Video & On Demand - Behemoth (Online and DVD)

Behemoth (Online and DVD)

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★★★★★
'Zhao has an incredible eye...Making reference to both the Old Testament – the beast of the title comes from the Book of Job – and to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Zhao takes a fiercely lyrical approach to the subject of industrialisation in China and the rapacious appetites that drive it. Travelling around the vast, verdant steppes of Mongolia, the film-maker discovers a paradise soon to be lost to the open cast coal mining that devours the land. Zhao juxtaposes the two worlds in arresting single shots: the frame is divided between the lush grassland that still – just – supports a nomadic community with the ugly grey scars that used to be mountains.'

Wendy Ide, The Observer

★★★★★
'The imagery is fantastic. An ectoplasmic moon perched on a ledge of ghostly cloud. Earth-movers dragging their primitive, unwieldy bulks like dinosaurs. A man hauling what seem logs of solid fire — it’s steel — from a furnace fit for Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Ugliness and beauty.'

Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times

★★★★
'Zhao Liang’s haunting documentary tessellates with Jia Zhangke’s recent films in studying the effects of China’s rapid industrialisation.'

Mike McCahill, The Guardian

★★★★
'The poetry and horror of globalisation and manual labour are beautifully evoked in this haunting doc-fiction hybrid....rich, deep and eventually very moving.'

David Jenkins, Little White Lies

'...remarkable, powerful film ... a sort of ‘dream documentary’ set in this ravaged landscape but liberally inspired by Dante.'
Lee Marshall, Screen International

'Maverick indie helmer Zhao Liang continues his muckraking tour of China’s social and environmental woes with the stunningly lensed, cumulatively moving “Behemoth.” Acting as a modern-day Dante on a tour through Inner Mongolia’s coal mines and iron works, Zhao (“Together,” “Petition”) eschews narrative for an impressively self-shot poetic exercise in controlled righteous outrage, emphasizing the contrasts between rapidly dwindling green pastures and dead landscapes disemboweled by toxic mining.'
Jay Weissberg, Variety

BEST DOCUMENTARY, 2015
'The assault on China’s landscape (Inner Mongolia to be exact) by the forces of industrialisation is viewed through a poetic filter that references Dante’s Divine Comedy and photographer Sebastiao Salgado’s ‘Work’ series. Behemoth (Beixi Moshuo) makes me forever grateful I write about films for a living and don’t have to pick bits of molten pig iron out of my skin at the end of each working day.'
Wendy Ide, Screen International

'As befits its title, the director Zhao Liang’s documentary “Behemoth” is colossal in scope. Its subject is the human toll of the environmental catastrophe of large-scale Chinese industrialization. A descent into a deep subterranean mine and a series of blindingly fiery eruptions in a steel mill are matched by Zhao’s calmly furious close-ups of workers whose faces and bodies are marked by these dangerous labours. Punctuated with terrifying (albeit controlled) explosions, choking smoke storms, and impressionistic images of fractured landscapes, “Behemoth” seems to shudder with the destructive power of invisible, ubiquitous, and cruelly indifferent authority.'

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

'This momentous essay-documentary takes us to the heart of Hell, Mongolia-style…Director Liang Zhao has read Dante and sometimes reads him to us, or adapts him for his own context. He starts with Purgatory — the vast and ashen terraces of north-western China’s largest strip-mine — and then maxes out his indignation in the Inferno. Deep-shaft digging; the blaze of smelting caverns. The images are stupendous and become more so. You sit there being smoked, scorched, blasted, pyred and cindered — and often loving it.'

Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times

★★★★

Behemoth is a stunning and moving denunciation of the situation in Inner Mongolia, where the mining industry is permanently changing the face of the landscape. It's as if Koyaanisqatsi had been filmed in Mordor.

John Bleasdale, Cinevue

'The movie is the latest attempt by the acclaimed filmmaker Zhao Liang to walk the line between art house cinema and didactic documentary, between the visually lush and the politically potent.'

Matt Sheehan, The Huffington Post

'Zhao Liang’s Behemoth is many things all at once: an observational documentary, an experimental ethnography, an existential essay.'
Jordan Cronk, Sight and Sound

★★★★

'A chilling study of China’s current environmental malaise'

Donald Clarke, The Irish Times

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