Up the Mountain

In Yang Zhang’s visually dazzling documentary, what could have been an amusing look at a painter’s rural school and the older villagers he mentors deepens into a moving and detailed look at family and community life cycles. Unfurling dense landscape compositions and splashing the screen with the saturated colors of the students’ work, Zhang picks up the strands of the coolheaded master’s own growing family and his star pupil’s burgeoning relationship, which takes the younger man into the new world of a bustling city. It’s a poignant, funny, and increasingly surprising picture of shifting generations and deep rural roots and traditions. North American Premiere