Blind Mountain

A selected film for the 2007 Cannes Film festival, Blind Mountain is a disturbing look at a form of marriage in China. A young college graduate is looking for a job, and after several months with no results, is desperate to find work to help support her parents. She befriends a young woman who has a lead on work that would take them to the countryside for several months. But upon arriving at a remote farming village in the mountains, she is drugged and her ID papers and wallet are stolen. She wakes up, alone and in a house where the people there claim that they bought her to be the wife of their son. Horrified, she tries to escape, but everyone -- the family and the villagers, conspire to keep her there, and there is only one way in or out of the town. After a mini hunger strike, refusing to participate with her new family, she is raped by the son, who needs help from his friends to consumate the marriage. She accepts her situation only to be able to move about the town, and meets other young women who have also been abducted. Some have accepted their fate, having born several children; in one case, a woman was crippled to prevent from escaping. She befriends the village teacher, who benefited from only having a high school education, and also wants to leave the village. They have an affair, and plan an escape, but it becomes clear that he was using her sexually, making promises to leave but never doing so. Their affair is discovered, and he is exiled from the village. The young woman sends letters to her family, but they are intercepted and destroyed. She escapes twice, but is captured both times -- once on the mountain road, and the second right out of a bus in a large town many miles away. At no time anyone comes to help her from being abducted. Finally, she becomes pregnant and has the child, a son. If it was to be a daughter, the baby would have been drowned, like another child whose body was discovered in the nearby river. She makes friends with one of the children, who arranges to mail one of her letters. This time it goes through, and her father appears several moths later, with a police escort. But they meet such resistance from the villagers that the officials have to go back to the town to get reinforcements, and the father stays with his daughter. The family tries to steal her away again before the police come back, but while beating up the father, the young woman has had enough, and kills the husband with a knife.