Exploring Chinese Cinema: [i]Mountain Patrol[/i]
The stories the world tells through film transcend news of current events and help us to understand the many ways people are alike, despite the barriers of language and political and religious ideology. The U.S. shares a rich cinematic history with other countries. This shared heritage is a foundation on which our countries can build a relationship of cultural understanding, one that will directly affect the youth of each nation.
Film is a powerful and visual language. It is also a universal language. The International Film Classroom was developed by The Film Foundation in cooperation with IBM and the United States Department of State. The program engages middle and high school students in the study of exceptional foreign films.
The goal of the Exploring Chinese Cinema lessons is to introduce students to foreign language film study, providing visual literacy skills to assist in reading and interpreting moving images of other cultures.
Although the three Chinese films are quite different in content and cinematic style, each reflects China’s changing society. The Film Foundation and its Chinese partners selected these films based on the following criteria: age-appropriate content, excellence in filmmaking, and educational value.
This unit is intended as an introduction only and not as an in-depth study of China or China’s rich film heritage. Each lesson has multiple activities that can be taught over 3–5 days. The lessons are interdisciplinary in approach, both reinforcing and challenging students’ knowledge of literature, history, geography, art and music.
Mountain Patrol (2004, directed by Lu Chuan) transports students to Tibet's Northern Plateau, where a band of volunteers have sworn to protect the endangered Tibetan antelope from poachers who slaughter and skin the animals for their soft fur. The captain of the patrol reluctantly agrees to allow a young photojournalist from Beijing to join him and his men on a journey into the mountains in pursuit of poachers. The journey quickly becomes much more than another news story for the reporter as he experiences firsthand the life and death struggle between the poachers, the patrol, and the land itself.
Teachers will need a DVD copy of the film to correspond with the written lesson material. Mountain Patrol may be rented, purchased or borrowed for use in the classroom.
