No less extraordinary than the action depicted in director Zhang Yang’s festival hit is the fact that it’s so watchable. Using nonactors and seemingly undisturbed by what we assume to be routine state interference, Zhang tells the story of 11 rural Tibetans who undertake a 1,200-kilometre pilgrimage to Lhasa—and not just by foot. Wearing sheepskin aprons and with wooden clogs strapped to their hands, these pilgrims, including a heavily pregnant woman, ritually throw themselves every five steps or so onto the ground as if they’re boogie-boarding on gravel (or concrete, mud, snow, or, in one particularly miserable sequence, along a flooded stretch of mountain highway). It’s a 10-month journey. Gruelling doesn’t come close.

Led by the farmer Nyima, the group is otherwise composed of friends and relatives casually inclined to seek atonement, like a butcher stricken with guilt about his lifelong slaughter of yaks. Ages vary, from the conspicuously frail uncle whose desire to visit the holy city initiates matters, to a couple of kids, and then another one, once the never-complaining party takes a brief time-out for the most unsentimentally lensed childbirth sequence in history.

With episodes like that, you inevitably wonder how Zhang pulled this thing off, or how much of it was drummed up in early-morning script conferences (my guess: not much!), even if the film’s increasingly beautiful compositions and lighting would suggest that nothing here was caught on the fly. There are narrative asides, like a sweetly tentative romance between a teenage traveller and a Lhasa hairdresser, and a less happy event that permits Zhang to visit the more otherworldly, hermetic parts of the Himalayas. But the implacable onward thrust of this conflict-free film is in depicting a shared experience of acceptance and devotion, which is understood by all who encounter the group. It’s a potent and strangely riveting experience for those of us who have wondered over time why we can’t just install a fridge right next to the couch.

Georgia Straight, September 2016