Last Train Home

Last Train Home (Director: Lixin Fan): China is argu­ably the world’s most important eco­nomy at the moment and the past fifty years have seen incred­ible changes, polit­ic­ally, eco­nom­ic­ally and socially. Many film­makers have emerged from the country, including a number of excel­lent doc­u­ment­arians. Chinese-Canadian Lixin Fan can proudly stand among them with Last Train Home, just his first fea­ture film as director.

In my lim­ited exper­i­ence, to make a great film about China, you must encom­pass the country’s vast­ness, both in terms of geo­graphy and of pop­u­la­tion, but also be able to focus in on indi­vidual stories. In this case, we are intro­duced to the Zhangs, a family of migrant workers, just as the par­ents are about to make their yearly journey home to their vil­lage to cel­eb­rate Chinese New Year. Along with 140 mil­lion other migrant workers, this is often the only occa­sion they get to spend time with their chil­dren and par­ents. Making their way from the indus­trial city in which they work to their vil­lage in the coun­tryside is an exhausting and stressful multi-day journey of more than 2,000 kilo­metres. Traveling by train, bus and ferry boat, they arrive exhausted and are able to spend only a few days with their son Yang (10) and daughter Qin (17), who have grown up under the care of their grandparents.

Despite the eco­nomic real­ities which make it neces­sary for fam­ilies to be divided this way, the Zhangs feel they are doing it so that their chil­dren will have better lives. They con­stantly badger their chil­dren about their grades, per­haps because they really have nothing else to talk about. Daughter Qin is reaching the stage of adoles­cence where she begins to rebel against her par­ents. She com­plains that they’ve essen­tially aban­doned her and her brother and a few months after they’ve returned to the city, she drops out of school to become a migrant worker her­self. The boredom of rural life for a teen­ager looks very dif­ferent from the per­spective of her par­ents who have been away for 16 years working in hor­rific con­di­tions just to provide their kids with this pro­tected upbringing, but that’s lost on Qin, who wants the “freedom” of working in a factory.

While this is a crushing blow for her par­ents, who wanted to see her finish her studies, by the next year, they’re ready to travel home again for the New Year hol­iday. They’ve been pres­suring Qin to return to school, and it looks as though she’s reluct­antly agreed. But this year’s migra­tion is affected by a snowstorm which knocks out the elec­trical grid and delays the trains for days. The scenes of huge crowds pushing each other are har­rowing. While the trip home is a huge hassle at the best of times, it become a ter­ri­fying ordeal when sched­ules don’t run smoothly. When they finally board their train, it’s clear that Qin is not speaking with her par­ents, and she spends the whole trip in sullen silence.

Things come to a head during the hol­iday, and Qin’s insolence leads to a phys­ical con­front­a­tion with her father. Eventually, like all par­ents, they resign them­selves to let­ting Qin go her own way, hoping that son Yang can finish school and sup­port the family. In the mean­time, they return to the city again, back to their mono­tonous factory jobs.

My syn­opsis makes this sound like a fic­tion fea­ture, and for all the intimacy the film­makers achieve, it might as well be. It’s helped tre­mend­ously by some very crisp editing, as well as some sweeping cine­ma­to­graphy of the lush Chinese coun­tryside. Last Train Home suc­ceeds in cap­turing both the epic scale of the changes sweeping today’s China and their impact on the indi­vidual fam­ilies strug­gling with them.

Two addi­tional notes. First the dis­claimer: my com­pany (Kinosmith) is the Canadian dis­trib­utor for this film. And second, the film is headed to the Sundance Film Festival, where it will com­pete in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Lixin Fan from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 15:48

Official site of the film

(9/10)

Tagged as: china, family, globalization