Showtimes: 6/27, 6:30pm and 6/29, 6:30pm at the ImaginAsian [BUY TICKETS]

Mainland China and Taiwan have a…strained relationship, to put it mildly. And yet KEKEXILI, a Mainland Chinese movie, won Best Film and Best Cinematography at the 2004 Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan, which are the Chinese equivalent of the Oscars. Once you see the movie this isn't such a surprise. The true story of one of the last expeditions conducted by Tibet's all-volunteer, anti-poaching patrols this harrowing trip into the Chinese badlands is brutal and beautiful. You'll come out of it a different person than when you went in.

In their desire to feed the lucrative Western market for pretty pashmina wool, impoverished Tibetans began poaching the endangered antelope, and the antelope population plummeted from 1 million to 70,000 in just 5 years. Unable to get official assistance in protecting Kekexili, the last virgin wilderness in China, locals formed volunteer patrols, locked and loaded their AK-47's, and engaged in a running, four-year war with the heavily armed poachers. A Beijing journalist, Ga Yu, went out on an incredibly dangerous 17-day patrol led by ex-military man, Ritai, and returned to Beijing to publish his account of what happened. His articles resulted in the Chinese government getting involved and rectifying the situation in 1997, but the human cost was enormous. This film is the story of that last patrol.

It's hard not to be moved by the tiny, fragile, highly killable humans who head out into the wilds of Tibet to put their lives on the line for a bunch of animals. If the poachers aren't perforating them with bullets, they can either freeze to death, step into quicksand, die of altitude sickness, dehydration, starvation, or in car accidents. And yet they walk right into the savage teeth of Kekexili, engaged in a quixotic quest that they don't even fully understand. They're not heroes, they're not environmentalists, and they're not members of Greenpeace. They're just people who decided that the killing had to stop.