Up the Mountain

— Ostensibly a look at life in a Chinese mountain village where master painter Shen Jianhua hosts a variety of followers including grandmothers engaged in brightly-hued, folk paintings of day-to-day life in the village. The result is a subtle, poetic film with amazing panoramas that are only rivaled by scenes of everyday life that are just as inspiring. In fact, the film has a rhythm and texture to it that emphasizes the beauty around us everywhere. Beautiful as the film is, it suffers from poor subtitles that are often have so little contrast as to be unreadable. A heavier hand at editing would have been welcome too, so the film might have been closer to 90 minutes instead of more than two hours. (Shown at True/False Film Fest 2019.)

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[2019. 126 min. Directed by Zhang Yang.]
https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/up-the-mountain-macao-review/5135158.article