Any back-to-nature fans contemplating a sustainable, organic lifestyle in rural China are well-advised to watch Blind Mountain first. Forget the lack of internet and decent plumbing - the primitive mindset of the back-country farmer poses the deal-breaker. It is a world-view that condones slavery, the subject of director Li Yang's 2007 follow-up to Blind Shaft, which dealt with the horrors of China's mining industry.

Among the plethora of injustices plaguing society and the movies that cover them, Blind Mountain is one of the few that deals with kidnapping and forced marriage. The phenomenon is by no means unique to China, yet rampant here out of all proportion to the trickle of attention it receives from the media. Even a dedicated internet investigation turns up scant information on the practice of selling kidnapped women into marriage; perhaps the practice of selling them into prostitution is more dire and worthy of copy. In any event, Blind Mountain reaffirms that sometimes art proves far more informative than journalism.

The movie takes us back to China's early 90s. Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu), a fresh-faced graduate desperate for work, is lured to rural Shaanxi on the promise of a job selling herbal medicine to farmers. But at the first village she stops at, she drinks a disastrous cup of water, regaining consciousness to find her ‘employers', ID, and wallet long gone. The villagers restrain her from leaving, and an old woman informs Bai that she has just been bought for 7,000 RMB, a wife for her thoroughly revolting son.

Skeptics wondering how such a crime could transpire without secrecy get a heaping dose of reality from Li Yang. He reveals the appalling moral relevance of the impoverished and uneducated, still mired in a 5,000 year tradition that, however grand, ever treated women as chattel. Rather than take issue with the husband for depriving a human being of her liberty, the village men chide him for not being forceful enough to consummate the union with his understandably resistant bride. The conjugal rape is at last accomplished whilst family members hold Bai down.

Thus commences a slow-paced yet taut prisoner's tale. Different phases of her captivity are punctuated by escape attempts, all frustrated by a common element, the utter indifference of others to her plight. The village official colludes with her husband. Tax collectors are more interested in getting paid than her pleas for help. A minibus driver encountering her on a desolate road won't waive his three-yuan fee, despite her obviously desperate state. Her pursuers even manage to drag her off a crowded bus; onlookers, including a policeman, who witness the struggle as she screams about being kidnapped, are satisfied by the husband's quick explanation: "She's my wife. She's crazy."

The callousness of bystanders is proverbial, and one might be tempted to dismiss the villagers' attitudes as written-in for drama, if Blind Mountain were a slicker film, with a Western bias. It's not. Huang Lu is the only professional actor in the cast, and Li Yang dedicates his craft to bringing to light what all of us, not just government censors, prefer to ignore, despite the urgency and suffering. There are no complex characters, special effects, or clever shots. Blind Mountain compels by virtue of its masterful pacing and stripped-down realism. Those curious about life in the Chinese countryside couldn't ask for a more honest slide-show - the gritty tile, the newspaper-decorated quarters, all the physical details of village life add convincing weight to Bai's stark circumstances, hidden from the world at large by a ring of rugged mountains.

Anyone serious about understanding China must be apprised of the parallel dimension that is the village, not to judge and condemn, but to realize that empowering the farmer will take more than economic parity. It would be nice to imagine that the scourge of kidnapped wives has diminished with China's growth, but then why would Li Yang have released the film last year? The ironic demand for girls to supply boys now means 117 of the latter for every 100 of the former. As long as life is cheap and tradition prevails over reason, Blind Mountain will be contemporary drama, not historical fiction.