As the last virgin wilderness in China – Kekexili, which is located at Qinghai – Tibetan Plateau. It’s plain nearly 4,700-meter-high and it is the only remaining habitat of the Tibetan antelope.
The film is based on a true story. Since 1985, poachers began hunting antelopes for their fine wool, which was prized in foreign markets. Only after a few years, the number of antelopes plunged from one million to under ten thousand. During the 1990s, in order to fight the poachers, a volunteer civilian patrol was form and try to stop the illegal poaching. In the meantime, they have to sacrifice their own lives.
Director Chuan Lu made this movie back to 2004, the film started with one of the patrol got killed by the patrol which is really intense, throughout the movie, there is no ideological speeches. It is more focus on actions between poachers and patrols.
Nowadays, people enjoy their colorful life, they have no clue what is happening to those wildlife, since they don’t care about them. The audiences of this movie care about our plant and all the wildlife on earth.
Movie review by The New York Times wrote: “Mountain Patrol has its own very specific take on things. Films about environmental catastrophes tend to wax preachy, putting pedagogy and scolding above art. This one, for all its sorrow and the throb of righteous anger it provokes (only about 50,000 antelopes remain), is more than anything a work of creative imagination.”
According to the IUCN red list of threatened species, Tibetan antelope is now under the new threatened category. However, back to 1996, it was under vulnerable category. That means people and the government is paying attention to the wildlife now.
The film Kekexili: Mountain Patrol made a major impact at the highest level. Tibetan antelopes achieved such a high profile that they became cute mascots called Yingying for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Link of the trailer: Kekexili: Mountain Patrol – US trailer
Cited:
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/04/14/movies/14patr.html
http://rukor.org/in-the-no-mans-land-of-tibet/
The trailer of Mountain Patrol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9hCEsOSQiA
IUCN SSC Antelope Specialist Group. 2016. Pantholops hodgsonii. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T15967A50192544. http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/15967/0
http://www.ibiblio.org/chinesehistory/contents/07spe/olympics/image.mascots.htm
zishan wang 