MOVIE REVIEW : China’s Students ‘Moving the Mountain’

Michael Apted’s “Moving the Mountain” is a major achievement, illuminating China’s student-led democracy movement that culminated so tragically in the Tian An Men Square massacre in June, 1989.

Drawing upon his formidable skills as both a director and documentarian, Apted confidently clarifies the complex chain of circumstances that led to that brief but profound outcry for democracy. Inevitably, “Moving the Mountain” is devastating but ends with a Chinese parable expressing the belief that the mountain can be moved--that democracy will eventually flower.

When the film’s British producer, Trudie Styler, met with a number of the democracy movement’s student leaders within days of their escape to the West, she found in Li Lu, now completing a law degree and a master’s in business administration at Columbia, a way to encompass China’s tumultuous history of the past three decades within the young man’s own story. Thus, setting the stage for all that is to come, Apted acquaints us with Li, who’s handsome, personable, fluent in English and a passionate campaigner for change in China while living in exile. As he recounts his life, Apted commences flashbacks in a deft mix of archival footage and scenes from his early youth re-created in Taiwan.

Born in April, 1966, a month before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, separated from his out-of-favor parents during infancy, a survivor of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake--one of the deadliest in history--Li learned self-reliance early on. On April 26, 1989, Li, then an economics major at Nanjing University in China’s central coast, sneaked aboard a train bound for Beijing, where thousands of people, mainly students, were beginning to gather in the wake of the death of ousted Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, a progressive economic and political reformer.

As we move toward Tian An Men Square, Apted brings Li together in New York with other escaped leaders: Chai Ling, commander-in-chief of the student headquarters during the demonstration, to whom Li had been a deputy; Wang Chaohua, the eldest of the students, who had crucial ties to the nation’s intellectual communities; and Wuer Kaixi, a feisty, early leader in the movement. In China, Apted also managed secretly to film Wang Dan, a fearless, key leader, only recently released from prison, and Wei Jingsheng, a veteran dissident, the students’ hero and inspiration--and also fresh from prison, where he had been serving a near-15-year sentence in horrendous conditions.

This beautifully structured film acquires epic dimension as the confrontation with armored tanks of demonstrators, hunger strikers and just plain citizens draws ever-closer.

Apted’s mastery of structure, his classic sense of the tragically inevitable, his seamless blend of amazing archival footage, re-creations of the students’ perilous escapes and their present-day observations come together like a thundering cataract, with much of the impact of D.W. Griffith’s four stories colliding at the climax of “Intolerance.” “Moving the Mountain” not only communicates (and commemorates) the meaning of Tian An Men Square in majestic fashion but also expands the possibilities of film itself.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: Newsreel images of the Tian An Men Square massacre and other depictions and accounts of brutality, plus complex political and historical issues, make the film too intense and sophisticated for pre-teens.

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‘Moving the Mountain’

An October Films release of a Xingu Films presentation. Director Michael Apted. Producer Trudie Styler. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti. Editor Susanne Rostock. Research director/production manager Drew Hopkins. Music Liu Sola. In English and Chinese, with English subtitles. 1 hour, 23 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 274-6869.