China, 1999. In Fenyang, childhood friends Liangzi, a coal miner, and Zhang, the owner of a gas station, are both in love with Tao, the town beauty. Tao eventually marries the wealthier Zhang and they have a son he names Dollar.
2014. Tao is divorced and her son emigrates to Australia with his business magnate father.
Australia, 2025. 19-year-old Dollar no longer speaks Chinese and can barely communicate with his now bankrupt father. All that he remembers of his mother is her name...
At once an intimate drama and a decades-spanning epic that leaps from the recent past to the present to the speculative near-future, Mountains May Depart is an intensely moving study of how China's economic boom and the culture of materialism it has spawned has affected the bonds of family, tradition, and love.
"Director Jia Zhangke offers a work of poetic prophecy in this romantic and political melodrama." - Colin Covert, Star Tribune
"Few filmmakers working today look as deeply at the changing world as Mr. Jia does, or make the human stakes as vivid." - Manohla Dargis, New York Times
"Enormously touching, highlighted by Jia's rapturous image-making and a luminous central performance by the director's regular muse (and wife), Zhao Tao." - Scott Foundas, Variety
Director’s Statement
It’s because I’ve experienced my share of ups and downs in life that I wanted to make Mountains May Depart. This film spans the past, the present and the future, going from 1999 to 2014 and then to 2025.
China’s economic development began to skyrocket in the 1990s. Living in this surreal economic environment has inevitably changed the ways that people deal with their emotions. The impulse behind this film is to examine the effect of putting financial considerations ahead of emotional relationships. If we imagine a point ten years into our future, how will we look back on what’s happening today? And how will we understand “freedom”?
Buddhist thought sees four stages in the flow of life: birth, old age, sickness, and death. I think the ultimate point of this film is to say: Whatever times we live through, none of us can avoid experiencing those stages, those difficult moments. Mountains may depart, relationships may endure.
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