New York Times: Last Train Home at Sundance

originally published in New York Times:

"Nothing attests to Sundance’s commitment to off-Hollywood more than its documentary selections, which year to year remain its most qualitatively consistent suit. That much was reconfirmed by “Last Train Home,” a beautifully shot, haunting and haunted large-scale portrait by Lixin Fan about an astonishing migration involving 130 million Chinese workers who each year travel by train, boat and foot to return home for New Year’s. Working in a classically unobtrusive documentary style, Mr. Fan, who was an associate producer on an earlier Sundance entry, “Up the Yangtze,” conveys the enormity of this exodus while bringing you close to a family whose fraught efforts to reunite — the parents work in a city, the children are in the country with a grandmother — are symptomatic of a deeper struggle affecting China. "