Blind Shaft

BLIND SHAFT, former documentary filmmaker Li Yang's feature debut, is both a bleak film noir set on a lawless frontier and an indictment of China's disastrous Economic Miracle. Hailed at film festivals across the glob, BLIND SHAFT's "relentless and tough minded storytelling has grueling precision," (NY TIMES) with "no wasted scenes and a steadily increasing tension" (Village Voice)

In modern Northwestern China, itinerant coal miners Tang and Song place a cash price on human life in a world where humanity has been deemed utterly worthless. The two homicidal grifters perversely turn the tables on a corrupt system of unregulated mines and negligent owners by befriending fellow minders, murdering them in staged "accidents," then passing their victims off as relatives in order to pocket their employer's hush money. But Tang and Song's ironic crime wave threatens to self-destruct after they recruit Feng, a naive young farm boy. Though merely fresh meat to Tang, Feng awakens long dormant sentiments in Song that threaten to drive a wedge between the two killers. Together, the three men's journey becomes a treacherous on-way descent into nerve shattering confrontation and brutally poetic justice.

Using back-door bribes and smash and grab camera techniques, Li Yang staged BLIND SHAFT in conditions every bit as hazardous as they're portrayed on film. Grueling fifty hour underground shoots and narrowly missed cave-ins pushed Li, his crew and his mostly non-professional cast to a level of detailed realism and two-fisted tabloid fury that gives BLIND SHAFT, "the focused intensity of a vintage B movie" (Village Voice).