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Editor's note: "Through a Screen Darkly," a monthly commentary by CT Movies critic Jeffrey Overstreet,explores films old and new, as well as relevant themes and trends in cinema. The column continues the journey begun in Overstreet's book of the same name.

Nothing here along the Yangtze River is what it seems.

Beautiful, but there's more than meets the eye

If we just look at the mountains, we'll be fine. They're breathtaking, looming green and formidable over the river's winding silver path. They flow into and out of one another like waves, shrouded in an eerie mist as if the ghosts have gathered here to rest. If we watch cruise ships drifting quietly through these gorgeous gorges, we might be moved to make travel plans.

But two films—new on DVD—will give us pause. Both shine a bright light on these landscapes and reveal a story that Chinese tour guides would rather cover up.

The deep water is the result of China's massive Three Gorges Dam project. In the works for almost a century, this concrete superstructure, nearly a mile and a half wide, was built in the middle of the Xiling Gorge to help control the Yangtze, which floods from time to time. But it will eventually accomplish much more: When the dam, Earth's largest hydroelectric power station, starts humming in 2011, it will provide clean electricity for more than 400 million people.

But as a dam, it will also change the Yangtze's flow. And since 2006, the waters have risen steadily across many miles. As a result, thousands of years of Chinese history, its ancient agrarian culture, and the homes and livelihoods of more than 1.2 million Chinese commoners have been displaced. It's Atlantis all over again—only this time humankind is to blame.

Think about that number: 1.2 million people, many of them poor, compelled to climb to higher ground, watch their world drown, and start life over again. What China is doing to its own vulnerable people seems unconscionable. As its new economy flourishes, energized by a swell of capitalism, the future is a tidal wave crashing over the past, and the people of "Old China" are forced to adapt or fight the current and drown.

Take your own tour of this "progress" in Still Life, a dramatic feature by China's celebrated filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2006. You can get a closer view in Up the Yangtze, a documentary by Yung Chang.

Missing persons have driven the plots of a thousand movies. But how many searchers have gone looking for a missing neighborhood?

For Still Life, a drama, filmmaker Zhang-ke carried his cameras around the disintegrating area of Fengjie while the Yangtze rose nearby. In the midst of breathtaking scenery and bizarre scenes of demolition and desperation, he follows a man and a woman on troubling quests to find their lost loved ones. While Sanming and Shen Hong seek their significant others, Jia himself is looking for a lost world and searching for glimmers of hope.

Sanming (Han Sanming), a coal miner, has left Shanxi to return to Fengjie in hopes of finding his wife and teen daughter, perhaps to make amends for abandoning them sixteen years earlier.

But he can't find them in the old familiar places because those places no longer exist. Asking directions to a particular address, he is pointed to the river. He drifts along on ferry boats, wanders through what looks like a bombed-out ghost town, and knocks on the doors of old acquaintances who populate ruins soon to be submerged.

Sanming Han as Sanming

Forlorn, Sanming is diagnosed by a friend as being a "nostalgist," and thus unfit for this rapidly changing world. Then, in a moment that illustrates this collision of old and new, they play their cell phone ringtones for one another. Sanming's is an old, old Chinese melody, while his friend's is a dreamy pop song about a very different river than the Yangtze—a river of love.

It's a complicated exchange. Is Sanming showing incapacity to move forward? Will the richness of past traditions be reduced to trite digital blips? Or is this a sign that Sanming is already finding ways to integrate his past and future?

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