The 19th Film Comment magazine’s annual festival, Film Comment Selects will showcase a selection of titles curated by the magazine’s editors, offering strikingly bold visions; opening with László Nemes’s Sunset.
Up the Mountain
Up the Mountain
NAME OF FILM: UP THE MOUNTAIN
DIRECTOR(S): Yang Zhang
GENRE: Documentary Film
SYNOPSIS: In Yang Zhang’s visually dazzling documentary, what could have been an amusing look at a painter’s rural school and the older villagers he mentors deepens into a moving and detailed portrait of family and community life cycles. Unfurling dense landscape compositions and splashing the screen with the saturated colors of the students’ work, Zhang picks up the strands of the coolheaded master’s own growing family and his star pupil’s burgeoning relationship, which takes the younger man into the new world of a bustling city. It’s a poignant, funny, and increasingly surprising picture of shifting generations and deep rural roots and traditions.