Eye Weekly: Last Train Home - ****

published at Eye Weekly

LAST TRAIN HOME

by Kieran Grant
January 13, 201

Editorial Rating: ****

An uneasy verité takes hold as Montreal-based filmmaker Lixin Fan trains his two cameras on a family of migrant workers in Guangzhou, China. The Zhangs have long since left their two children behind with grandparents on the farm in order to make money as factory workers in the city. Their pledge to reunite the family in domestic normalcy is foiled when it turns out that the distance, the years and a good dose of teen angst has given their daughter Qin some migratory plans of her own.

Fan seamlessly crafts a family drama from his raw documentary footage. The Zhangs aren’t so much compliant as they are natural and, ultimately, unabashed as their slow-to-crack stoicism gives in to the stresses of industrialized Chinese society. (The eponymous train ride back to the country is the sort of mind-boggling, state-sanctioned ordeal that’d have Westerners hyperventilating from acute inconvenience.) Yet this is hardly National Geographic turf, and Last Train Home becomes all the more resonant and empathetic as it draws us into the Zhangs' live-to-work reality — a reality that may well await us, too.

NOW: Don't Miss This Train - NNNN

published at NOW Toronto

Don’t miss this Train

By Susan G. Cole
January 13, 2010

Editorial Rating: NNNN

Beautiful, enraging and heartbreaking, Last Train Home puts the spotlight on China’s working poor.

Every year, Suqin Chen and Changhua Zhan join the planet’s largest human migration, of 130 million people. At the new year, the two leave their big-city factory jobs and the tiny cubicle where they sleep to be reunited with their families in a remote village over 2,000 kilometres away.

This hard-working pair left for the city 16 years ago for only one reason – to provide for their families. But they’ve sacrificed any connection with their own children, leaving them, especially their 16-year-old daughter, Qin, with a profound sense of abandonment and palpable anger.

Director Fan contrasts China’s smoggy cities and near idyllic remote villages with a confident eye.

The core of the film, however, is a violent family argument back home, made all the more upsetting by Fan’s spectacular account of what it took for the two workers to get there.

The sequence tracking a sea of people on a long trek, made more gruelling by a power outage that’s messed with the train schedule, is like nothing you’ve seen before.

A must-see meditation on the human price the Chinese pay for the cheap goods we consume. The movie gets a wide release in late February, but at these Doc Soup screenings (Wednesday, January 20, at the Bloor), Fan hits the stage to do Q&As.