Blind Mountain follows a young woman, Bai Xuemei, in the early 1990s who is looking for work to fund her brother's education and pay off her parents' debts after they paid for her to go through college.

After a month of fruitless searching, some people offer her a well paid job; however, this is a trick and instead they drug her and then pretend to be her family and sell her as a bride to a villager in the Qin Mountains of China's Shaanxi province.

Trapped in the fiercely traditional village, where her documents have been taken away and she is physically restrained at times, the young woman finds her avenues of escape are blocked.

[1] The actor who acted as the abducted woman Zheng Xiaolan in the film was actually cajoled into that village from a county in Sichuan.

Blind Mountain ultimately failed to win anything at Cannes, with the Prix un certain regard going instead to Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin'.

While the audience at Cannes gave a standing ovation to Blind Mountain when it was screened,[6][7] the critics have been mixed in their reaction.

Writing in Hong Kong cultural magazine, Muse, Perry Lam observed, 'What makes this film so heartbreaking and so hard to watch sometimes is its determination to let us experience without varnish the depths of the heroine's despair and meet all the wretched characters who have a role to play in her tragedy.