General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Mountains May Depart (山河故人)

Mountains May Depart (山河故人) is a 2015 Chinese drama film written and directed by Jia Zhangke, told in three parts set in 1999, 2014, and 2025, following a love triangle in the coal-mining town of Fenyang, Shanxi, and its consequences across a quarter century of Chinese social change¹. It premiered in competition at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and was released in mainland China on 30 October 2015²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Jia Zhangke, his eighth feature film³
Structure	Three chapters set in 1999, 2014, and 2025, moving from Fenyang to Australia¹
Principal cast	Zhao Tao (Shen Tao), Zhang Yi (Zhang Jinsheng), Liang Jingdong (Liangzi), Dong Zijian (Dollar), Sylvia Chang (Mia)⁴
Aspect ratios	4:3 (1.33:1) for 1999, 16:9 (1.85:1) for 2014, and a 2.35:1 widescreen ratio for 2025⁵
Awards	2015 Cannes competition film; Golden Horse Award for Best Original Screenplay; Asian Film Award for Best Screenplay⁶
Mainland box office	Over 30 million yuan, breaking Jia's previous mainland box-office record³
Tenth-anniversary re-release	12 December 2025, when the film's imagined 2025 coincided with the present⁷

Spoilers

Story

The first chapter, set in Fenyang in 1999, centers on Shen Tao (Zhao Tao), a shop assistant and dance instructor courted by two childhood friends: Zhang Jinsheng (Zhang Yi), a newly rich entrepreneur in the coal and oil business, and Liangzi (Liang Jingdong), a coal miner whose livelihood is shrinking as coal prices fall⁴^•⁸. Tao chooses to marry the wealthier Jinsheng; the heartbroken Liangzi leaves town, throwing away his house keys as he goes⁵. Tao and Jinsheng have a son, Zhang Daole, whose name echoes the English word "Dollar"².

The 2014 chapter shows the costs of that choice. Tao and Jinsheng are divorced, and seven-year-old Dollar lives with his father, distant from his mother¹. Liangzi returns to Fenyang with his wife and child, his lungs ruined by years of mine work, and asks Tao for help paying for treatment; she visits his home and provides the money⁹. Tao's father dies suddenly, and Jinsheng prepares to take Dollar to Australia⁵. On a slow green train taking the boy to Shanghai, Tao gives him the key to her house, telling him the train is slow so she can keep him longer⁵.

The final chapter is set in Australia in 2025. Nineteen-year-old Dollar, raised in English, no longer speaks Chinese and can barely communicate with his now bankrupt father¹⁰. The only Chinese word he retains is "Tao", meaning wave, without knowing it is also his mother's name¹⁰. He begins a relationship with his older Chinese-language teacher Mia (Sylvia Chang), a Hong Kong-born migrant raised in Toronto, and through her lessons gradually recalls his mother⁴^•¹¹. In the closing scene, he intends to take Mia on a flight to China to see his mother, though the reunion itself is never depicted.¹ In the closing scene Tao dances alone in falling snow to the Pet Shop Boys' "Go West", the same song that opened the film⁵.

Form and structure

Three aspect ratios. Each chapter uses a different screen ratio: 4:3 (1.33:1) for 1999, 16:9 (1.85:1) for 2014, and 2.35:1 for 2025, so the frame widens as the characters' world expands⁵. Chinese commentary linked the three ratios to three media eras, the DV television age, the widescreen film age, and the digital super-widescreen age¹². A 2025 academic study read the progressive widening through the Northern Song painter Guo Xi's "Three Distances" theory and Zhuangzi's idea of the wandering mind, arguing the ratios carry traditional Chinese aesthetics into modern film language¹³.

Recurring symbols. Commentators cataloged a set of motifs that recur across the three periods: the Yellow River, the Wenfeng Pagoda, keys, dumplings, the songs "Zhen Zhong" (Farewell) by Sally Yeh and "Go West", a gun, and trains²^•⁵. Jia himself described the film's subject as qingyi, the Chinese pairing of emotional affection (qing) with bonds of loyalty and obligation (yi); in his native Shanxi usage, yi, the commitment that survives even when affection fades, is what remains between Tao and Liangzi when he returns ill⁹.

The English title translates a Chinese saying, "Mountains may depart, but emotions stay the same"⁸.

Reception

The film divided critics from its Cannes premiere onward. Admirers saw it as a summation of Jia's two decades of concern with ordinary lives amid epochal change; critics found the characters reduced to mouthpieces for the film's structure and its sociological symbols². Reviewers repeatedly singled out the 2025 chapter as the weakest, citing the English-language dialogue and the age-gap romance, while praising Zhao Tao's performance as the film's emotional anchor¹⁴^•¹⁵. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 89% Tomatometer score from 87 reviews⁴.

In mainland China the film earned over 30 million yuan, at that time Jia's best commercial result and a counterexample to the assumption that art films cannot find audiences³.

The 2025 re-release

On 12 December 2025, the film returned to mainland cinemas for its tenth anniversary, timed so that the third chapter's imagined 2025 coincided with the actual year⁷. The re-release included a "Mountain River Post Office" campaign: 50,000 commemorative gift sets containing a postcard to be sealed for ten years and a ticket for a hypothetical 2035 screening, extending what promoters called the film's "ten-year appointment"⁷. At anniversary screenings Jia told audiences that a longer cut with new material might appear in 2035¹⁶. Clips of Tao's snow dance and the green-train farewell circulated widely on short-video platforms during the re-release³.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2015 to 2019 › Drama films 2015 and 2016 › Released in 2015

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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