Far From China's Bustling Cities, the Grind of Poverty Not for the faint of heart or weak of bladder, Wang Bing's two-and-a-half-hour "Three Sisters" documents extreme poverty in rural China with the compassionate eye and inexhaustible patience of a director whose curiosity about his country's unfortunates never seems to wane. Filming for six months in a remote hillside village in 2010, Mr. Wang follows the spirit-crushing lives of a short-tempered peasant and his three little daughters. Their mother ran off long ago, and now Yingying, 10; 6-year-old Zhenzhen; and Fenfen, 4 - all so malnourished that they look years younger - spend their days doing chores and herding sheep. But when their father leaves for a job in the city, taking the two youngest girls with him, Yingying is left alone. A grandfather and an aunt live close by, but the girl's isolation and sadness suggest a poignant hopelessness, as though she has reached the age at which she has begun to notice a future. And it's not pretty. Though less overtly political than Mr. Wang's nine-hour masterpiece from 2003, "Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks" (which chronicled China's painful transition from a state-run economy to a free market), "Three Sisters" makes its point in lice-infested hovels and with the bleeding feet of endlessly coughing children. A communal meal at a great-uncle's house reveals village elders sniffing at the government's proposed "rural revival," knowing that it really means extra land fees for already strapped peasants. Clearly, the country's economic boom is not trickling down, leaving them frozen in a way of life as ancient as the ground beneath their feet.