Part of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s mission is to foster greater understanding through world cinema. This year 72 Foreign Language films were submitted for Golden Globes consideration. Here is an overview of one of them.

In 2013 Jia Zhang-Ke won the screenwriting award at Cannes with A Touch of Sin, a fascinating narrative in which several stories crisscrossed on the backdrop of the extraordinary economic development and attendant change affecting social fabric and human relations in contemporary China.

His follow up effort Mountains May Depart, is practically a companion piece and a sequel of sorts, further investigating the contours of the amazing pace of change and development in Earth’s most populous nation and its effects on its people

Here the story involves Liangzhi and Zhang. The latter is a budding visionary capitalist in the small town they live in, while Zhang is a simple worker. They both woo Tao, who eventually marries the more successful man. So enthusiastic a believer is he in the promise of his (and China’s) future, that when their son is born he names him Dollar.

The story picks up several years later and in the meantime Zhang has divorced Tao and moved to Shanghai where he has become a truly successful oligarch, winning custody of Dollar and taking a new wife. If it wasn’t bad enough, Dollar’s dad, who has educated his son to speak English, is about to move with his family to Australia.

The final act, set in the near future, sees Dollar trying to come to terms with his roots, his country and his mother, who he has left behind along with his identity.

The film is obviously rooted in the rapid change that is transforming China. Characters move as in a daze in a world they hardly seemed to recognize – full of sweatshop factories, newfangled capitalists, brothels, violent crime and above all the alienation that comes from radical transformation in a very short time. But this is not social realism or heavy-handed metaphor. Rather it is a film on the poetics of displacement, a thoughtful allegory that goes to the heart of one of this time’s great social and economic trends through his very human characters.

Luca Celada