Blind Shaft ( 2003 )

BLIND SHAFT, former documentary filmmaker Li Yang´s feature debut, is both a bleak film noir set on a lawless frontier and an indictment of China´s disastrous Economic Miracle. Hailed at film festivals across the glob, BLIND SHAFT´s "relentless and tough minded storytelling has grueling precision," (NY TIMES) with "no wasted scenes and a steadily increasing tension" (Village Voice).

In modern Northwestern China, itinerant coal miners Tang and Song place a cash price on human life in a world where humanity has been deemed utterly worthless. The two homicidal grifters perversely turn the tables on a corrupt system of unregulated mines and negligent owners by befriending fellow minders, murdering them in staged "accidents," then passing their victims off as relatives in order to pocket their employer´s hush money. But Tang and Song´s ironic crime wave threatens to self-destruct after they recruit Feng, a naive young farm boy. Though merely fresh meat to Tang, Feng awakens long dormant sentiments in Song that threaten to drive a wedge between the two killers. Together, the three men´s journey becomes a treacherous on-way descent into nerve shattering confrontation and brutally poetic justice.

Using back-door bribes and smash and grab camera techniques, Li Yang staged BLIND SHAFT in conditions every bit as hazardous as they´re portrayed on film. Grueling fifty hour underground shoots and narrowly missed cave-ins pushed Li, his crew and his mostly non-professional cast to a level of detailed realism and two-fisted tabloid fury that gives BLIND SHAFT, "the focused intensity of a vintage B movie" (Village Voice).

Upplagd i sortimentet: 19 Maj, 2006