Editor’s Note:
Doc Soup is a monthly documentary screening programme run by the good folks at
Hot Docs. It gives audiences in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver their regular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs festival itself.
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
24 City (2008, Director: Jia Zhang-ke): Despite my best intentions, I have yet to see a film from the man some critics are now cheekily referring to as “Jay-Z.” Known for films like The World (2004), Still Life (2006) and Useless (2007), Jia explores the seams between China’s ancient traditions and the dizzying pace of modern life in the world’s most populous nation. In this, his latest film, he mixes documentary filmmaking with fictional storytelling to weave together a larger narrative involving the workers of a venerable military factory which is now being turned into luxury condos in the southwestern city of Changdu.
Since this was my first exposure to Jia’s work, I can’t say for certain that it’s representative of his style, but I sure hope so. Essentially the film is a series of monologues framed in long or mid shots interspersed with stately pans over the factory buildings. His patient camera demands that we pay attention to what we’re looking at. While some of the fictional stories are slightly more melodramatic, all of the workers’ recollections are moving. Combined with the reverential camerawork, Jia makes a poignant statement about the dignity of work. 24 City is an elegy for a way of life many in China are eager to leave behind, but in many ways it’s simply about the passing of time and about the way individuals have little control over it. Even though their work seemed crushing in its monotony, sinister in its purpose and at times overwhelming in the demands it placed on the workers’ lives, all of them seem to miss it. Or rather, they miss the small tragedies and romances that flourished and then faded, along with their youth, just like the factory itself. Lovely stuff.
Clip
(8/10)
Tagged as:
#tiff08,
china,
work
Editor’s Note:
Doc Soup is a monthly documentary screening programme run by the good folks at
Hot Docs. It gives audiences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their regular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs festival itself.
Up The Yangtze (2007, Director: Yung Chang): Set against the ongoing development of the Three Gorges Dam, Up The Yangtze is an intimate film about the momentous forces changing modern China. Director Yung Chang, born near Toronto and now a Montreal native, travelled to China in 2002 with his grandfather, who wanted to show him the great river he’d been telling stories about for years. They took one of the “Farewell” cruises which are designed to show tourists the landscape before it is flooded by the dam project. After this surreal experience, Chang knew he had to make a film. Though there are some hints of the film about tourism that he originally envisioned, he wisely focuses on the people being directly affected by this enormous public works project. China itself sometimes seems to be one giant construction site, and the growth of cities has led to an ever-growing hunger for the electricity to power them. Though damming the Yangtze was a dream originated by Mao, it wasn’t until the late 1990s when the project began to come to fruition. The result has been a massive forced relocation of more than two million people, as the rising water levels flood many villages.
Chang found the subjects of the film during the regular recruiting sessions held by the cruise line. Chen Bo Yu is quickly christened “Jerry” for his interactions with Western tourists. He’s 19 and an only child of rather well-off parents. Typical of the sons of China’s one-child policy, he’s a “little emperor”, arrogant and self-centered, used to getting his way. He takes the job in order to make as much money as possible, and at one point boasts that he’s making more than his parents. But he doesn’t survive the three-month probation, possibly as a result of an allegation that he shook down some tourists for “personal tips”.
Yu Shui, on the other hand, needs this job desperately, to support her family. Although only just out of middle school, her subsistence farmer parents can’t afford the fees to send her to high school, and suggest she get a job. They’re also keenly aware that their ramshackle hut by the river, with its vegetable garden, will soon be swallowed up and they’ll have to find paying work. Quickly dubbed “Cindy” by her employers, she struggles to overcome her shyness and the obvious class differences between her and the other employees. Her English skills aren’t as well-developed as her employers would like, so she starts her working life washing dishes in the kitchen. For someone whose ambition is to attend university and become a scientist, this humiliation, along with her homesickness, is difficult to take. But she makes a few friends along with her salary, and soon we wonder if she’ll return home at all.
Her parents had agonized about sending her off to work, and are clearly uncomfortable having to exploit her in this way. But her father also wants her to see the world, even if that just means the rest of the river, and at their first reunion, her parents’ pride is evident. But so is Yu Shui’s embarrassment. Part of it is the typical teenager’s feelings about her parents, but it’s also clear that she’s different from the other young people working on the ship. When her boss invites them aboard for a tour, it’s almost excruciating to watch. But you also get the feeling that she’s going to be ok in this new future, while her parents will continue to struggle.
It’s clear that China’s renewal is unstoppable, but that it is also proceeding without much pity for the rural population. In one scene, a shop owner tearfully pours out a tale of beatings and forced relocation as a statue of Mao sits benignly behind him. I wonder what Mao would think about a country still officially committed to Communism rolling over the very people it professes to revere. There is a time-lapse scene near the end of the film where we watch the rising water claim Yu Shui’s family’s beloved riverbank shack, and it wordlessly drives home the utter indifference of “progress” to the most vulnerable people caught up in it. Much like Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufactured Landscapes (and the Edward Burtynsky photographs it is based upon), Up The Yangtze is a historical document of a time and place that will not exist for long.
Official site
Donation site where you can help Yu Shui/Cindy’s family
UPDATE: The film opens theatrically in Toronto on Friday February 8 at the Cumberland cinema. I suggest you catch it on the opening weekend since there’s no guarantee how long the run will last. Seeing it on a big screen really does make a difference.
(9/10)
Tagged as:
china
Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien): I have to admit that as much as I’m familiar with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s name, I hadn’t seen any of his previous films (Three Times (2005) and Café Lumiere (2003) being the most recent). That being said, someone I know told me that in his opinion, most of Hou’s best work was from the 80s and 90s and is actually pretty hard to find. Setting the film in Paris was admittedly a gamble, and deciding to make a sort of homage to Albert Lamarisse’s classic children’s film La Ballon Rouge (1956) an even bigger one. For me, anyway, it didn’t pay off.
We’re dropped into a story with very little exposition. Juliette Binoche plays Suzanne, a voice actor for a puppet theatre and a harried single mom. Her son, Simon, is watched by a new nanny, Song Fang, who just happens to be both Chinese and a film student making a film. So, with an obvious directorial stand-in in place, what happens? Not too much. Song uses Simon in her film project which is very much like the classic film, and we see footage scattered throughout the rest of the main film including, somewhat confusingly, at the very beginning, before we’ve even met the characters. There are also scenes where the titular orb floats outside the apartment when Song is not actually filming. I found its presence baffling most of the time, and the film, like the lives it portrays, as scattered and uneven, though well-intentioned. Suzanne’s living arrangements are messy and her relationships unclear, and by the end of the film, there’s really no sense of resolution. What I did like about the film was its wonderful use of natural light, as well as the corresponding naturalness of the dialogue, with characters repeating dialogue not heard the first time by other characters, and other realistic touches.
But in the end, I wasn’t really moved. My balloon, instead of taking flight, just slowly deflated over the film’s 113 minutes.
Trailer
(6/10)
Tagged as:
children,
china,
france,
TIFF
Wasted Orient (Director: Kevin Fritz, USA, 2006): I’d seen the trailer for this on distributor Plexifilm’s site a few weeks ago and was really happy to be able to attend the film’s first Canadian screening. Joyside are a Chinese punk band based in Beijing and the film follows them on their first tour. This being China, the band starts with a 15-hour train ride to Guangzhou in the south of the country, and the long journey gives them plenty of time to drink. Drinking seems to be the constant in the film, and one gets the impression that anything more illicit than beer and gin may be simply out of their financial reach. Despite their constant state of intoxication and their aversion to bathing, the band are actually a likeable bunch of guys who are relatively proficient musicians. They name-check, either in interviews or by playing covers, many of the early punk bands and personalities from New York: The Ramones, The Dead Boys, Johnny Thunders (It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “Chinese Rock”). And these guys are punk in that early, primitive sense: they’re nihilistic, but they’re not mean, or political. They just don’t see the point in pursuing the lives their parents or polite society would prefer for them. In that sense, they’re not much different from their idols. But, of course, this is China.
Other critics (mostly Americans, I suspect) have played up the “Communist” angle, with variations on “Rockin’ in the Unfree World” and that sort of nonsense. The truth is that modern China may be more capitalist than North America, and what Joyside is rejecting seems to be materialism and the appearance of success more than anything else.
The film is very raw, and one or two people in the small audience (maybe 20 people) found it a bit too much and left. But I was riveted. Kevin Fritz has lived in China for several years, and got to know the band very well, so he has really captured a level of intimacy that hardly seems possible for an “outsider.” The beer helps, though, as in scenes where he features each band member in a drunken one-on-one with the camera. A bit surprisingly, each comes across as touchingly earnest and even a bit maudlin.
Despite the endless beer guzzling, the pissing and vomiting, the rude gestures and the poses of despair, these are just four young guys trying to make sense of their circumstances. It doesn’t hurt that they can rock out, too.
Official site for the film
(7/10)
Tagged as:
china,
Documentaries,
music,
nxne
