Zhao Liang (b. Dandong, Liaoning Province, 1971), a graduate of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang who originally specialised in art photography, is one of the foremost practitioners of Chinese 'new documentary'. After making a number of highly evocative 'essay films' and observational documentaries in the late 1990s, of which the best known are *Farewell to Yuanminyuang*, about the planned destruction of an artists' colony near the remains of the Summer Palace, and *Paper Airplane* (2001), about the lives of a group of heroin addicts in Beijing, Liang turned the spotlight on the administration of criminal justice in China in a series of documentaries beginning with *Return to the Border* and continuing with *Crime and Punishment* (2007) and the highly controversial *Petition: The Court of the Complainants* (2009). His most recent major work, *Behemoth* (2015), a 'guerilla documentary' about the ruthless exploitation of labour and the destruction of the grasslands of Inner Mongolia by open-cast coal mining, filmed in images at once beautiful and terrible, has attracted widespread critical acclaim in the West and has won a number of major awards in Western film festivals. *Together* (2010), a quasi-official documentary about the 'making of' the feature film *Love for Life* and the everyday realities of living with HIV/AIDS in China, represents something of an exception to Liang's earlier work, in that it was part-financed and sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Health and heavily promoted as part of a Government publicity campaign against discrimination and stigmatisation of HIV-positive people. However, *Behemoth*, with its dramatic exposure of the ruinous effects of open-cast coal mining on both the physical health of the miners and the environment of the Mongolian grasslands, appears to signal a return to Liang's trademark practice of ethically sensitive independent documentary film-making, but on a more epic scale.