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
Let’s Make Money (Director: Erwin Wagenhofer): In 2005, I saw Wagenhofer’s We Feed the World (review), which was about the impact of globalization on food production. Here the director turns his typically dispassionate eye to the world of finance. As in his previous film, he takes us on a global tour, shooting in vivid widescreen 35mm. Along the way, he lets his interview subjects define the tenets of neo-liberal economics: deregulation of financial markets, liberalization of trade, reduction in the power of the state, and privatization of state-owned resources. He’s not an active presence in the film, and although he lets subjects from all sides of the issues speak, it’s in his editing and structuring of the film where his perspective comes through. For instance, after hearing from the German owner of a fabricating plant in India, we cut to a scene of a billboard advertising products for a European company. Under the billboard are the shacks of people too poor to ever afford these products. Wagenhofer lays out a very clear scenario where money is extracted from countries in the so-called “emerging markets” to enrich the already-wealthy “investors” from the West.
In Burkina Faso, the biggest export is cotton, a crop which leaves the soil unsuitable for growing anything else, including food. As a local production manager explains, Burkina Faso could support itself on its cotton exports alone if the US government didn’t subsidize its own cotton farmers. He complains that the West preaches free markets but then practices protectionism at home. The only other work in Burkina Faso is breaking rocks at a quarry, making the country look like a cross between a slave plantation and a prison chain gang.
Another startling segment is set in the southern region of Spain, the so-called Costa del Sol. Despite the desert climate, thousands of new apartments are being built around new golf courses. Since there is very little rain, these golf courses need to be constantly irrigated with massive amounts of water, even though hardly anyone in Spain plays golf. Worst of all, since these apartments are being sold as investment properties, many are being purchased by large pension funds. Local people simply can’t afford them. The end result is that nobody is living in them. In some sweeping helicopter shots, we see empty apartments covering huge swathes of previously unspoiled coastline. At the end of the film, we’re informed that there are three million of these empty apartments in Spain.
For the most part, the “talking head” interviews are filmed in unusual places, making them visually interesting. Development economist John Christensen is filmed on a beach in Jersey, where he was born, explaining how Jersey and other small places like it have become home to offshore trusts, a method for corporations to avoid tax and hide the origin of their profits. Former “economic hit man” John Perkins appears to be walking through a jungle as he explains his own predatory past.
All in all, Wagenhofer has created another compelling examination of forces that can often seem impersonal and impenetrable. The level of craft in his work is remarkable and he’s not afraid to put his camera in unexpected positions to make his points visually as well as with words. If I have one criticism, it’s that the film, at 107 minutes, is perhaps 20 minutes too long. This sort of exposition, no matter how beautifully and clearly presented, does tend to require a bit of time to process, and I think keeping this under 90 minutes would have given it more impact. At its current length, it would be easier to digest on a smaller screen. Making one of the sequences an extra on the DVD version seems like a good idea to me.
Official site of the film (in German)
(8/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs09,
economics,
finance,
globalization
Food Inc. (2008, Director: Robert Kenner): In this comprehensive and yet compelling film, director Robert Kenner, along with authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Nood Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) indict the American (and by extension, global) food industry. Just the fact that we call the producers of our daily bread an industry at all shows what sort of major changes have taken place in the worlds of farming and raising livestock in the past century. The explosion of fast food in the 1950s brought factory methods to the production of food and the ensuing consolidation among corporations has resulted in an increasingly monopolistic marketplace. To save costs, the size of farms and feedlots and slaughterhouses has escalated and safety standards and working conditions have plummeted.
This wide-ranging film touches on almost every conceivable issue that has affected our food supply, from new bacterial organisms that threaten our health, to deteriorating goverment regulatory bodies, the widespread use of illegal immigrant workers, and the explosion in diabetes rates among the young. And yet we’re still sold an image of American’s agrarian past, and we believe it. None of the big food producers were willing to talk to Kenner, and so he spoke to others: to the woman whose 2-year-old died from an E. Coli infection, the chicken farmer who refused the demands of one of the big corporations and lost her contract, the man trying to fight for slaughterhouse workers’ rights, and the articulate organic farmer who’s simply trying to fight the good fight for honest and healthy food. And more than just talking heads, there are some eye-popping images from slaughterhouses and some incredible overhead shots of the vast feedlots where the majority of our food comes from.
Most disturbing, or at least problematic, is the recent phenomenon of small organic food companies being bought up by the large corporations. Is this a legitimate attempt to “green” their businesses, or is it just “greenwashing”? Is the fact that Stonybrook Farm, the largest organic food company, is now selling its products at Wal-Mart a good or a bad thing? The film touches on the subject but leaves the conclusions to us. That’s a bit symptomatic of a film which brings up so many serious issues, but doesn’t have time to tackle them all. I’d recommend the two books above as a starting place, and the film’s accompanying web site also promises to be a useful resource, not just for educating ourselves, but for taking some action.
It’s a little difficult for me to be objective about this subject, because I’ve read the books and have seen a number of documentaries over the past few years on this subject, but I am hopeful that this film has the potential for mass appeal where others have not. After our screening, there was a long ovation and some insightful questions. It remains to be seen whether this film will catch the imagination of the mainstream (non-film-festivalgoer) population. I desperately hope so.
Official site where you can find next steps
Here is the Q&A with director Robert Kenner and author Eric Schlosser 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: 12:59
(9/10)
Tagged as:
#tiff08,
corporations,
environment,
farming,
food,
globalization
The Big Sellout (Der Grosse Ausverkauf) (Director: Florian Opitz, Germany, 2006): Beautifully shot on film, The Big Sellout is yet another strong political documentary, this one on the theme of privatization. Since privatization is a keystone of neoliberal economic policy all over the world, the film takes us to several different locales to see its effects on real people. What we discover is that the effort by multinational corporations to turn the necessities of life (healthcare, electricity, even water) into commodities is having a devastating effect on the people of the developing world.
In the Philippines, Minda spends all of her time trying to scrape money together for dialysis treatments for her teenaged son. In South Africa, Bongani is part of a group of skilled activists who restore electrical service to those whose power has been cut off for non-payment. In Bolivia, Rosa is a grandmother who stood up to the faceless corporation that was attempting to privatize her city’s water supply. And in England, Simon the train driver details the breakup of British Rail and the decline of rail service in that country.
In every case, privatization was the culprit, but to be fair, Opitz attempts to engage with the economists at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who often impose privatization as a precondition for lending to developing nations. Surprisingly for the director, he gets very little cooperation from these shadowy bodies, who are ostensibly required to be transparent and accountable to their member nations. The one economist he does interview is Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank who now disagrees with the rush to privatize everything, and who has become an opponent of most of the economic policies of globalization.
I was reminded when watching this film of several other strong anti-globalization documentaries of recent years, including The Take, The Corporation, and even The Yes Men. The Big Sellout adds some heartrending personal stories from several corners of the world, and it’s clear that privatization is really only helping those with too much money make even more of it. Without having to pay lip service to the democratic ideals of national governments, corporations are concerned with just one thing: the pursuit of profits. The profits may come, but the human costs should be tallied against them.
The only weakness in the film may be that I was left wondering what I could possibly do, in my comfortable First World life, to combat this creeping sickness. The film’s German web site has some educational materials, so I hope these get translated for the English site soon.
Here is the Q&A with producer Florian Opitz 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: 12:37
Official site for the film
(9/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs07,
bolivia,
Documentaries,
economics,
germany,
globalization,
Hot Docs,
philippines,
politics,
privatization,
southafrica,
uk
The World According To Sesame Street (USA, 2005, Director: Linda Goldstein Knowlton and Linda Hawkins, 105 minutes): Sesame Street has proven to be a very successful American export, now being seen in more than 120 countries. This film looks at the very unique process of establishing co-productions with local educators, producers and puppeteers, focusing on two challenging locations: Kosovo and Bangladesh.
By far the most time is spent on the Bangladeshi production, and the real star of the film is Sesame Workshop producer Nadia Zylstra, who began her job three weeks before filming began. We follow this very excitable South African woman as she begins the process of defining what the program will look like in Bangladesh. The film shows us the nuts and bolts of how the production comes together, and some of the challenges involved when dealing with local opposition and delays.
I enjoyed the film and found it very inspiring, but I think it missed a chance to dig a bit deeper into the issue of what some audience members called “cultural imperialism.” Though they’re very careful to “partner” with local people, the Sesame Street organization is still American and fuelled by American values and definitions of success. Some of the questions surrounding the “export” of an American model would have been very interesting to explore.
(8/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs06,
children,
Documentaries,
globalization,
Hot Docs,
Television
