National Post: Have work, will travel

originally posted at the National Post:

To tell the story of one family of Chinese migrant labourers, Lixin Fan decided to move in with them

Vanessa Farquharson, National Post
Published: Wednesday, February 24, 2010

In 2006, Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal released the award-winning Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary that examined China's sprawling industrialization; that same year, a young Lixin Fan moved to Montreal from Hubei province in central China to work on Up the Yangtze, an award-winning documentary about the Three Gorges Dam.

Now, Fan has completed his own debut feature, Last Train Home, which opens Toronto's Human Rights Watch Film Festival tonight before coming to theatres on Friday.

Not surprisingly, the film is a sociopolitical documentary set in China. But what makes it stand apart from Manufactured Landscapes and other films of that ilk is its focus on the humanity behind the economics. It's one thing to marvel at the scale of China's workforce on a sprawling macro level, but quite another to focus intently on a single family -- in this case the Zhangs, whom he met while touring a denim factory in Guangdong province.

"In an ever-shifting migrant world, personal trust takes a long time to establish," the filmmaker says, "but time was on my side. I never had a deadline, I just kept filming and waiting to see how these people's destiny changed."

After accumulating some 300 hours of footage over the course of a few years -- essentially becoming part of the family himself -- Fan then spent even longer in the editing room.

The struggle lay in figuring out how to tell the story of China's 130 million migrant workers -- who all scramble to make the journey home to the countryside each New Year -- using only the five members of the Zhang family.

"Internal migration has many different levels of meaning to it," Fan says. "On a personal level, it's shifting the traditional family structure a lot. Economic change and advancements are having huge impacts on individual lives. But there are also challenges that China's overall economy has to deal with, and there's a global aspect, too -- all the products they export are made to support an unsustainable lifestyle at home."

Unsustainable is really an understatement: The Zhangs left their home and relatives 16 years ago to find work in Guangdong; subsequently, they only see their children a few days each year. Over the past decade, their eldest daughter has grown resentful, and the tension escalates during one particularly painful scene in the film.

"It was totally unexpected and just happened after this long train ride," Fan says. "I was actually in the next room, changing a light bulb and heard a shout. It was a very tough moment because we were so emotionally attached by that point. But it reveals so much of the conflict in this family and how it's an inevitable result of this society and this time, and how this big nation is just dashing towards modernity."

It's a pace that takes an incredibly harsh toll on China's working population, and Fan goes to great lengths exploring not just the financial and physical duress, but the psychological struggle, too. Still, he has hope for the future.

"I think it will change," he says. "The government has realized that if they have an economy growing at this rate, they need to deal with it differently. But it takes time."