Our country needs to see this: the early documentaries of Zhao Liang

Zhao Liang is best known to contemporary audiences for Behemoth (2015) which employs extraordinary imagery, lyricism, and the structure of Dante’s Inferno to document the human and environmental cost of unchecked industrialisation in modern China. At the Open City Documentary Festival (4-10 September), Zhao was the subject of a dedicated strand that included a masterclass with the director alongside screenings of three of his earlier non-fiction feature films…