{"id":33804,"date":"2016-04-08T08:47:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-08T08:47:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-05-14T18:46:02","modified_gmt":"2020-05-14T18:46:02","slug":"8804-top-films-on-china-and-the-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/nature\/8804-top-films-on-china-and-the-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"Top films on China and the environment"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Road<\/a> (2015)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span>Independent film maker Zhang Zangbo spent three years embedded in a construction company in central China’s Hunan province. The result is a powerful and <\/span>shocking insight into the human and environmental costs of China’s infrastructure boom.<\/span><\/p>\n

Zhang documents the corruption and abuse behind the construction of a stretch of the provincial highway by local officials and gangsters. It centres around protagonist Mr Meng – company vice president and “problem solver” – as he deals with injured workers demanding compensation; local people whose homes are destroyed, their family graves dug up, sacred trees and Buddhist temples flattened; local thugs demanding payment; and communist officials inspecting unsafe construction work.<\/p>\n

This film is particularly poignant at a time when China’s companies are going overseas to build roads and infrastructure in countries with even weaker governance than the backwaters of Hunan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Behemoth<\/a><\/span> (2016)<\/strong>\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

This documentary combines with art film to produce a powerful testament to the human and <\/span>environmental costs<\/a> of coal mining and consumption in China, the world’s biggest user of coal and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Director Zhao Liang – whose past work has exposed the fate of the most marginalised in Chinese society – shot the film on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia and in the “ghost town” of Ordos to show how rapid development has created hell on earth in China.
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