Blind Shaft [DVD] [2003]

China's coalmines are notorious for their abuse of workers, their annual death toll, and the corruption of management and officials - much of the mining takes place in secret so it will remain unregulated. There are profits to be made, and the wages are relatively high for anyone who is prepared to take the risks and tolerate the conditions.

"Blind Shaft" follows two petty crooks (Song and Tang) who make a living killing their fellow workers then embezzling compensation from the mine bosses. After decades of the Maoist message that the working class is honourable and united, here we have two workers ruthlessly exploiting their comrades. They pick up a naive young boy to become their next victim, but their plans begin to come apart at the seams as questions of morality and luck trouble them.

Li Yang pursued realism, filming underground in real mines, enlisting the aid of mine owners, shooting on the streets and in the shanty dormitories. Apart from the two leads, all the actors are amateurs. The camera is handheld throughout, creating a documentary feel in places. It also allows an intimacy in the portrayal of the miners - dangerous work, appalling living conditions, but they can laugh and joke and emerge as 'real' people with families, lives, and dreams way beyond the boundaries of the mine.

China is a vast country - "China has shortages of everything except people," says one of the characters - but its population had been raised to eschew Western materialist values ... and then, suddenly, told to embrace capitalist ways. Li Yang exposes the moral confusion and sense of loss of identity which pervades the land - identity is something which can be bought on the black market, but it's not something individuals can readily retain.

The characters in "Blind Shaft" bemoan the fact that they have been cut adrift. They have lost touch with their families and home. They have not enough money to continue their education and therefore their hopes of a better job. They live in a world in which everyone is struggling to survive - people sell themselves on the streets, a criminal underclass is highly visible, and anything and everything has its price.

This is an extraordinarily tense, well-paced drama, relieved by moments of comedy. It also has an extraordinary sense of realism with the claustrophobia of the mining camps, the ever-present prospect of violence or industrial injury, and the huge, sprawling cities which emphasise that the individual is dispensable. Thoroughly engrossing drama which will hold your attention.

That in fact is what happened. Turns out that drifting miners Tang, the older, and Song have dreamed up a murderous scheme in which they recruit young men to go with them to work in the mines. They make the young man pretend that he is related to them. Then they kill him, fake a cave-in and demand hush money from the boss of the mine. We see this work one time, and then the two men are off to the town to spend their ill-gotten lucre. And then it's back to recruitment and a new mine.

Part of the logic of this premise is the fear of the mine operators that if there is an accident, there will be an investigation and the mine will be closed down. So they pay hush money to the families of those killed to keep the authorities away. How realistic this is I have no idea. The scam certainly is a brutal, bestial way to make a living that cannot go on for long.

In the next part of the movie Tang and Song find a poor 16-year-old country boy in the city who is looking for work. Director Li Yang carefully shows us a lot of interaction among the three as the next setup develops at a new coal mine. What makes all this so interesting are the glimpses we get of life in modern China, the wretched, dangerous coal mines, the cities teeming with all their poverty and industry, their hustles and indifference. The landscapes are not lush with greenery; instead it is cold and bleak and the ground is mostly barren. This is not a travel log for tourists, nor is this an ode to the communist state. What we see is a rural and agrarian society perverted by a forced industrialization.

We see the housing for the miners. We see them at meal times and at play. We see what they eat and drink, how they amuse themselves. We see the great dependence that China has on coal. There is a lot of coal in China and it is used for heating and cooking and for firing kilns and crematoriums. It runs the industrial state. Coal burns dirty and pollutes. Although Li Yang does not dwell on it or show us the poisonous clouds that hang over many Chinese cities, we nonetheless get the picture.

Perhaps the most evocative shot of all is the last one. A body with a blanket over it is shoved into the crematorium oven. The door is slammed shut; the fires incinerate. The camera pans up, up to the top of the smokestack and we see puffy tendrils of smoke emitting. That's it. Run the credits.

The simplicity of the story starkly told and the low-budget realism of the cinematography lend to this film a sense of truth and immediacy not found in more carefully contrived productions.