Come with us into one of the world’s most incredible cave systems, Vietnam’s Hang Son Doong, in a new and visually stunning documentary. Want to know how to watch A Crack in the Mountain? Simply head into cinemas, as it’s now playing.
Only discovered by logger Ho Khảnh in 1991, and fully surveyed as recently as 2009, the Hang Son Doong cave system looks like it belongs on James Cameron’s Pandora rather than tucked away in South East Asia. Located near the Loatian border in Quảng Bình province, it’s considered one of, if not the, biggest caves in the world, its volume of 1,600,000 cubic metres enough to encompass an entire New York City block (buildings included). It’s a place of unparalleled natural beauty, fed by a vast underground river and containing a unique ecosystem that has been undisturbed for millennia.
Such a find represented a potential tourism boom for the impoverished people of Quảng Bình, still recovering after being bombed into the Stone Age by US forces during the Vietnam War. And as director Alastair Evans documents, in 2014 plans were afoot to install a cable car system in the cave to facilitate visitors. However, the prospect raised the ire of environmentalists concerned about the impact on Hang Son Doong’s ecology. And so A Crack in the Mountain steers away from mere scenery porn to instead explore the tensions between environmentalism and economics, specifically exactly who has the right to decide how such a place can be utilised, and to what end?
Featuring stunning nature photography but offering no pat answers, A Crack in the Mountain instead asks uncomfortable questions, pitting the poverty of the local population against the good intentions of well-meaning, mostly western, conservationists whose ideals may be on point, but whose lives have been largely free of unexploded munitions. It’s difficult territory to map, to be sure, but it’s certainly worth exploring.
