Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang said on Friday the Mongolian coal mine depicted in his documentary "Beixi Moshuo" (Behemoth) is a vision of hell out of Dante's "Divine Comedy", and hopes viewers everywhere will realize ravaging the environment must stop.

The film, competing for the main prize at the Venice Film Festival, is an extraordinary look at what resembles a human anthill of ceaseless, manual work by miners at a sprawling complex in China's northern Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

“My biggest hope is to convey the message that no matter where you are and what your living conditions are and where you actually live, people should be more aware of these issues and maybe lower their expectations and their desires towards life and not waste that many resources and supplies, to live more simply," Zhao told Reuters in an interview.

"I hope people get to reflect about their lives and how our lifestyles affect everything around us, including the environment."

Working around-the clock under floodlights, the mines and its workers have displaced the local herdsmen, whose grasslands have disappeared. The film shows miners staggering under their workload, and also glimpses of them in hospitals, being treated for black-lung disease brought on by breathing coal dust.

Zhao, a veteran documentary maker whose films often look at dysfunctional aspects of Chinese society, said he hadn't needed the permission of the Chinese authorities to make the film, because it is an independent production with French support, but he would need permission to show it in China.

At a press conference he noted only one Chinese journalist was present, reflecting what he said might possibly be official pressure on them not to attend.

"But I think there must be some sort of misunderstanding anyway because nobody has ever seen this movie and so it's wrong for them to decide that it is not desirable for it to be screened. They should see it first, then decide it is not appropriate, if at all," Zhao, whose remarks were translated from Chinese into English by the festival, said.

He said the notion that his images from the coal mine might be framed as a modern-day version of the 14th-century Florentine poet Dante Alighieri's descent into hell had been suggested to him by the film's French backers, the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) and ARTE France.

"We had this connection with Dante's 'Divine Comedy' by pure chance because every time I visited the place, the location I got the idea of being down in hell and when I showed the footage to the producers they suggested I read it," Zhao said.

He said that what Dante wrote in the early 14th century "corresponds to what we experience here in our days, and this was how this connection with the 'Divine Comedy' by Dante was developed and became part of my film".

(Additional reporting by Hanna Rantala; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/12/us-filmfestival-venice-behemoth-idUSKCN0RB1NE20150912

Scheduled to air on French cultural network Arte in November, the film should travel from its Venice premiere to other festivals, while its elements of performance art interspersed with industrial horror might also work in museum spaces.

Zhao and his French co-writer (and producer) Sylvie Blum draw inspiration from Dante's Divine Comedy, beginning with the image of a massive rock crater ruptured by explosions that send clouds of black coal dust billowing into the atmosphere. Zhao's introductory voiceover explains that where once there was lush vegetation and mountain springs, now not even a blade of grass grows in these flattened valleys of gray.

Gorgeous pastoral sequences show sheep grazing; Zhao then widens that view to reveal the steady shrinkage of pastureland. Traditional rural workers are displaced, while more and more mountains are reduced to rubble, and prairies are buried beneath ash. Observing with unblinking indignation, his camera gazes down on a valley crawling with trucks, cranes and other machines that look like toys, belching out smoke. "The monster's playthings" is how Zhao describes them in his intermittent narration, adopting a dreamy, ponderous tone that can get a bit precious.

In the film's most strikingly cinematic section the screen turns to red as Zhao's camera enters the nearby ironworks. The staggering heat and intensity of the furnaces is palpable, and the baked faces of workers stream with sweat as the cacophonous noise of the machinery gives way to deafened silence when they exit on breaks. Zhao's words perhaps overstate the theme of a living hell fueled by greed, but there's nothing prosaic about the infernoesque images.

The most unsettling passages of Behemoth show the heavy toll of this life on the alarming number of workers battling lung disease, denied aid by both their industrial overlords and their government. And the film moves toward a conclusion of grave lyricism in which Zhao reveals the paradox of all this human drudgery and environmental violation helping to create pristine but empty clusters of apartment towers in urban satellite centers. The destruction of a natural paradise has yielded luxury graveyards, transformed into "ghost cities" by the burst development bubble.

Shot over a two-year period, Zhao's film makes lucid points about the dire consequences of relentless energy and fuel consumption. Like the narration, some touches are self-consciously arty — a naked figure in fetal position seen repeatedly in places where grassland meets scorched earth; the screen broken into prismatic fragments that suggest an industrial cathedral; a literal mirror held up to show our collective responsibility. But even if those elements seem too studied, the subtle impact of this contemplative documentary can't be denied.