Mountains May Depart – Official Trailer

Now on Digital, Blu-ray and DVD: Mainland master Jia Zhangke scales new heights with Mountains May Depart. At once an intimate drama and a decades-spanning epic that leaps from the recent past to the present to the speculative near-future, Jia’s new film is an intensely moving study of how China’s economic boom — and the culture of materialism it has spawned — has affected the bonds of family, tradition, and love. Mountains May Depart opens in 1999 to the strains of the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West,“ a song whose promise of blue skies captures the dreams of affluence that seized so many Chinese youth at the turn of the century. And it’s to the West that small-town dance instructor Shen Tao (played by Jia’s muse Zhao Tao) looks when she spurns the shy, introverted labourer Liangzi (Liang Jindong) to marry the slick entrepreneur Zhang (Zhang Yi). The couple soon welcomes a son, whom Zhang names Dollar — though if he could have seen only a few years into the future, he would surely have christened hi