originally published at Eye Weekly:
Editorial rating: **** (out of 5)
An uneasy verité takes hold as Montreal-based filmmaker Lixin Fan trains his two cameras on a family of migrant workers in Guangzhou, China. Couple Yang and Suqin 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, after some 16 years apart, is foiled when it turns out that the distance, the passing of time and a good dose of teen angst has given their 17-year-old daughter Qin some migratory plans of her own.
Gaining extensive access to the family’s day-to-day life that, over time, leads to relaxed interviews and much hard-won trust, Fan seamlessly crafts a family drama from his raw documentary footage. The Zhangs aren’t so much compliant as they are natural — as much themselves, it seems, as anyone under such scrutiny could be. They are ultimately unabashed as their slow-to-crack stoicism gives way under the stresses of life amongst the gears of industrialized China. (The eponymous train ride back to the country from Guangzhou city 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.
Friday, February 26, 2010
CBC News: Montreal filmmaker focuses on China's migrant workers
originally published at CBC News:
Montreal filmmaker Lixin Fan set out to expose the underbelly of the Chinese economic miracle in his documentary Last Train Home.
The film, shot over three years in his native China, made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and is scheduled to open in Toronto and Vancouver on Friday.
Last Train Home follows the fortunes of a single peasant family, the Zhangs, who labour in the factories of Guangdong province, making cheap goods for the West. Mom and Dad get a chance to travel back to their home village and see their children just once a year, at the Chinese New Year. But in the 16 years they have been living like this, their daughter has grown estranged from them.
Fan said he first witnessed how hard the lives of migrant workers can be when he was a reporter for CCTV in China before immigrating to Canada. Compared to his own comfortable city life, these former peasants have to make huge sacrifices, he said in an interview with CBC's Q cultural affairs show.
"Since China opened up to the world 30 years back, economic growth — the development — so largely depends on the contribution and sacrifices of millions of migrant workers. It's them who builds the skyscrapers and works on the line making all these exports for the country's economy," Fan said. "I felt I should really make a film to document their lives."
Last Train Home is the debut documentary for Fan, who worked as associate producer on the acclaimed film Up the Yangtze and as editor on To Live Is Better Than To Die, about AIDS in China. Like Up the Yangtze, Last Train Home was produced by Montreal's EyeSteelFilm.
Fan said he met and talked to dozens of workers in Guangzhou factories before deciding to follow the Zhangs.
"When I first met the mother, she told me that they left the village and their daughter 16 years ago and they only got to spend less than a year [with her] in those 16 years. It's a heartbreaking story in this family and it really resembles the lives of millions," he said.
Especially painful is a fight during the New Year holiday that leads to a breach in the family and leads to the daughter leaving school and seeking out a factory job of her own.
"The father and the daughter get into a very intense fight. Those are difficult moments for me as a documentary filmmaker," Fan said. After following the family over three years, and developing a strong relationship with them, he had to stop himself from intervening.
The documentary touches on the rapid changes Chinese peasants have faced in the past 60 years. The grandmother was encouraged to stay on the farm, the parents saw their only opportunity at factories in the city and their daughter has yet another set of expectations.
"That generation — they are more bold and courageous to pursue the kind of life they want," he said.
Fan reflected on his shock, in his early years in Canada, at the comfort of the lifestyle here. It made the lack of rights for Chinese workers all the more shocking when he began making the film.
"In the West, we take things for granted, like cheap products I don't think all of us realize what is the real cost behind all these cheap products — there is a human cost," Fan said.
There's no easy solution, as China relies on the export of cheap goods to feed its people, he said.
The film was shown at the Guangzhou Documentary Film Festival last year, an emotional experience for Fan. The young audience, many of them students, loved the film.
"One boy said he couldn't stop crying during the screening — it was like seeing his own life on screen. His older sister had to give up school and go to work in the factory so he could continue studying," Fan said.
Last Train Home opens Friday in Toronto and Montreal and across the country in March.
Montreal filmmaker Lixin Fan set out to expose the underbelly of the Chinese economic miracle in his documentary Last Train Home.
The film, shot over three years in his native China, made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and is scheduled to open in Toronto and Vancouver on Friday.
Last Train Home follows the fortunes of a single peasant family, the Zhangs, who labour in the factories of Guangdong province, making cheap goods for the West. Mom and Dad get a chance to travel back to their home village and see their children just once a year, at the Chinese New Year. But in the 16 years they have been living like this, their daughter has grown estranged from them.
Fan said he first witnessed how hard the lives of migrant workers can be when he was a reporter for CCTV in China before immigrating to Canada. Compared to his own comfortable city life, these former peasants have to make huge sacrifices, he said in an interview with CBC's Q cultural affairs show.
"Since China opened up to the world 30 years back, economic growth — the development — so largely depends on the contribution and sacrifices of millions of migrant workers. It's them who builds the skyscrapers and works on the line making all these exports for the country's economy," Fan said. "I felt I should really make a film to document their lives."
Last Train Home is the debut documentary for Fan, who worked as associate producer on the acclaimed film Up the Yangtze and as editor on To Live Is Better Than To Die, about AIDS in China. Like Up the Yangtze, Last Train Home was produced by Montreal's EyeSteelFilm.
Fan said he met and talked to dozens of workers in Guangzhou factories before deciding to follow the Zhangs.
"When I first met the mother, she told me that they left the village and their daughter 16 years ago and they only got to spend less than a year [with her] in those 16 years. It's a heartbreaking story in this family and it really resembles the lives of millions," he said.
Especially painful is a fight during the New Year holiday that leads to a breach in the family and leads to the daughter leaving school and seeking out a factory job of her own.
"The father and the daughter get into a very intense fight. Those are difficult moments for me as a documentary filmmaker," Fan said. After following the family over three years, and developing a strong relationship with them, he had to stop himself from intervening.
The documentary touches on the rapid changes Chinese peasants have faced in the past 60 years. The grandmother was encouraged to stay on the farm, the parents saw their only opportunity at factories in the city and their daughter has yet another set of expectations.
"That generation — they are more bold and courageous to pursue the kind of life they want," he said.
Fan reflected on his shock, in his early years in Canada, at the comfort of the lifestyle here. It made the lack of rights for Chinese workers all the more shocking when he began making the film.
"In the West, we take things for granted, like cheap products I don't think all of us realize what is the real cost behind all these cheap products — there is a human cost," Fan said.
There's no easy solution, as China relies on the export of cheap goods to feed its people, he said.
The film was shown at the Guangzhou Documentary Film Festival last year, an emotional experience for Fan. The young audience, many of them students, loved the film.
"One boy said he couldn't stop crying during the screening — it was like seeing his own life on screen. His older sister had to give up school and go to work in the factory so he could continue studying," Fan said.
Last Train Home opens Friday in Toronto and Montreal and across the country in March.
NOW Toronto: Lixin Fan Interview
originally appeared at NOW Toronto:
Chinese check-in: Lixin Fan keeps track of the human cost of China’s growth in Last Train Home
by Susan G. Cole
Having just returned from my first visit to the U.S. since the attempted plane bombing at Christmas, I can report that flying across the border via Pearson is brutal: a two-and-half-hour wait, hordes of herded travellers. But compared to the migrant workers’s ordeal in Lixin Fan’s documentary Last Train Home, my trip was a breeze.
Fan’s emotionally gripping film tracks Changhua Zhang and Suqin Chen, two among 130 million Chinese who live and work in their big-city factories and visit their families back in the village only at the new year.
The story is both heartbreaking and astonishingly intimate. Fan was lucky to find a couple so willing to open up.
“They hesitated at the beginning,” he says, choosing his words carefully. His publicist tells me he’s worried about his English, which is ridiculous – he’s absolutely eloquent.
“In an ever-shifting migrant world, personal trust is hard to get in a short period of time. People come from different parts of the country. One day they’re on the production line, and the next they could disappear.”
As a camera operator for CCTV’s news group in China covering stories in remote areas, Fan got a feel for the vast rural society and the disparity between rich and poor.
Last Train Home makes some of these differences clear. The smog-covered cities seem downright ugly compared to the spectacular rural landscapes.
“I see it as a sort of irony,” he says. “If you just look at the scenery you want to have that pastoral life, but behind that scenery is poverty, a miserable life and not that much hope, especially for the younger generation.”
The film’s centrepiece is a sensational sequence showing the mammoth crowds trying to board their homeward-bound trains. In 2006, when the crew was shooting, a snowstorm triggered an electrical blackout that kept trains from departing, forcing people to wait for days at railway stations. The sea of jostling humanity, expertly shot, is a breathtakingly scary sight – almost like a war zone. Fortunately, the crew had a plan for keeping track of their subjects.
“It was a huge logistical challenge,” Fan says, “but we used small cameras. And we gave the parents a wireless microphone so that when they got lost they could speak into it and my cameraman could pick it up.”
Another moving sequence is much more private. The two parents, away from the brutal hardship of their factory, where they eat in a cafeteria and sleep in a tiny cubicle, have to face their profoundly alienated children. In an all-out family battle, daughter Qin tells Changhua to fuck off, turning to the camera to say, “See, this is the real me.” Her father, previously only stoic, loses it and strikes her.
Fan had a difficult choice to make: let the camera roll or intervene to stop the violence. Eventually, he stepped in to separate them.
“It’s a tough choice. You’re making a documentary film, and you have to be ethical. I wanted to address a bigger issue, but not at the risk of hurting the family.”
Essential to Fan’s perspective – and the film’s emotional resonance – is the fact that he blames no one for the painful working conditions and wretched family situations, even the Chinese authorities.
“No one has a choice,” he says emphatically. “The girl was born to the countryside and has no opportunity. The parents have to leave their children behind. The factory owner doesn’t share profits with the workers because the government is taxing him. The government taxes because it has to maintain a comparative advantage in exporting because the country depends on it.”
Next time you see an iPhone, remember that it’s not made in China, just assembled there, and as Fan puts it, China ends up getting only a crumb of the pie.
Chinese check-in: Lixin Fan keeps track of the human cost of China’s growth in Last Train Home
by Susan G. Cole
Having just returned from my first visit to the U.S. since the attempted plane bombing at Christmas, I can report that flying across the border via Pearson is brutal: a two-and-half-hour wait, hordes of herded travellers. But compared to the migrant workers’s ordeal in Lixin Fan’s documentary Last Train Home, my trip was a breeze.
Fan’s emotionally gripping film tracks Changhua Zhang and Suqin Chen, two among 130 million Chinese who live and work in their big-city factories and visit their families back in the village only at the new year.
The story is both heartbreaking and astonishingly intimate. Fan was lucky to find a couple so willing to open up.
“They hesitated at the beginning,” he says, choosing his words carefully. His publicist tells me he’s worried about his English, which is ridiculous – he’s absolutely eloquent.
“In an ever-shifting migrant world, personal trust is hard to get in a short period of time. People come from different parts of the country. One day they’re on the production line, and the next they could disappear.”
As a camera operator for CCTV’s news group in China covering stories in remote areas, Fan got a feel for the vast rural society and the disparity between rich and poor.
Last Train Home makes some of these differences clear. The smog-covered cities seem downright ugly compared to the spectacular rural landscapes.
“I see it as a sort of irony,” he says. “If you just look at the scenery you want to have that pastoral life, but behind that scenery is poverty, a miserable life and not that much hope, especially for the younger generation.”
The film’s centrepiece is a sensational sequence showing the mammoth crowds trying to board their homeward-bound trains. In 2006, when the crew was shooting, a snowstorm triggered an electrical blackout that kept trains from departing, forcing people to wait for days at railway stations. The sea of jostling humanity, expertly shot, is a breathtakingly scary sight – almost like a war zone. Fortunately, the crew had a plan for keeping track of their subjects.
“It was a huge logistical challenge,” Fan says, “but we used small cameras. And we gave the parents a wireless microphone so that when they got lost they could speak into it and my cameraman could pick it up.”
Another moving sequence is much more private. The two parents, away from the brutal hardship of their factory, where they eat in a cafeteria and sleep in a tiny cubicle, have to face their profoundly alienated children. In an all-out family battle, daughter Qin tells Changhua to fuck off, turning to the camera to say, “See, this is the real me.” Her father, previously only stoic, loses it and strikes her.
Fan had a difficult choice to make: let the camera roll or intervene to stop the violence. Eventually, he stepped in to separate them.
“It’s a tough choice. You’re making a documentary film, and you have to be ethical. I wanted to address a bigger issue, but not at the risk of hurting the family.”
Essential to Fan’s perspective – and the film’s emotional resonance – is the fact that he blames no one for the painful working conditions and wretched family situations, even the Chinese authorities.
“No one has a choice,” he says emphatically. “The girl was born to the countryside and has no opportunity. The parents have to leave their children behind. The factory owner doesn’t share profits with the workers because the government is taxing him. The government taxes because it has to maintain a comparative advantage in exporting because the country depends on it.”
Next time you see an iPhone, remember that it’s not made in China, just assembled there, and as Fan puts it, China ends up getting only a crumb of the pie.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
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."
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."
Toronto Star: Last Train Home: The high price of low-priced Chinese goods
originally posted at The Toronto Star:
by Jason Anderson
February 24, 2010
An emotionally wrenching portrait of migrant workers in China, Last Train Home has already become one of the most acclaimed Canadian documentaries in recent years.
The winner of prizes at film festivals in Amsterdam, Whistler and Montreal, it plays Wednesday at the Isabel Bader Theatre as part of the Human Rights Watch series before starting a regular theatrical run on Friday.
Director Lixin Fan – who will be on hand for questions at tonight's screening – is in Toronto for his film's local premiere. As the 33-year-old Chinese-Canadian filmmaker explained in an interview, this city has particular significance to him as it was the first stop in his own immigration story.
"I was passing over Scarborough while I was flying into Pearson this morning," said Fan, who is now based in Montreal. "That was the area where when I came in spring of 2006 – I lived in a basement there as a freshly landed immigrant. Being on the plane today and seeing all those houses and buildings, I did get emotional. It's been quite a journey for me personally in the past four years."
Before immigrating to Canada, Fan worked as a journalist for the Chinese broadcaster CCTV. Keeping a foot both in the official sphere and the world of independent filmmakers more willing to be critical of the state, Fan also edited To Live Is Better Than to Die, a documentary on the impact of AIDS on a rural Chinese community that was banned at home after winning several awards abroad.
Unsure of how to begin his career in Canada after landing in Toronto, he chanced upon news of a spotlight on China at that year's edition of Hot Docs. A fortuitous meeting with Montreal director Yung Chang and producer Mila Aung-Thwin led to his involvement in a documentary they were planning. The result was Chang's film Up the Yangtze, which went on to become one of the most successful Canadian documentaries of all time.
"That was only three months after I landed," Fan said, "so I really feel like I was one of the fortunate ones in the big immigrant army trying to find their dreams in Canada."
But given the many ironies of life in our globalized economy, it's not so strange that this new immigrant would repeatedly return to his previous home. Part of Fan's goal was to pay tribute to those who he believes have helped fostered the "glamorous development" that China has today yet have reaped little of the benefit.
"The migrant workers are great contributors to China's prosperity," he said. "They're the people who made it possible. Yet they don't necessarily get what they deserve; there's not enough social care or social support for this group."
Fan and his small crew spent almost three years documenting the lives of Changhua and Sugin Zhang, two factory workers in the industrial city of Guangzhou. Like tens of millions of workers, they toil to support children and other family members left back home in China's impoverished rural areas.
Fan said creating the film had more to do with waiting than shooting. "My crew and I would go to the factory day after day and just sit with the parents and talk to them about their day and their lives," he said. "We'd sleep on the piles of clothing they made and waited until they got off work, usually at midnight. We tried to blend in and gain the amount of trust we needed. That really helped to make our way into their lives and hearts."
Then there were the surreal and gruelling scenes at the local train station, where huge mobs of desperate workers spend a week or more trying to start their journeys home to celebrate Chinese New Year, often their only chance to see their families in the entire year.
Fan believes that Last Train Home's often raw emotional content is the biggest reason why audiences are connecting with his film so strongly. "I think the story is really universal," he said. "On a personal level, it's a family story. It's something that could happen anywhere in the world so people can easily relate. On another level, audiences do realize after watching the film that the lives of migrant workers have a very close relationship with our lives in the developed world. It's very easy for us to ignore the real price behind the cheap price tag of the products we consume every day."
by Jason Anderson
February 24, 2010
An emotionally wrenching portrait of migrant workers in China, Last Train Home has already become one of the most acclaimed Canadian documentaries in recent years.
The winner of prizes at film festivals in Amsterdam, Whistler and Montreal, it plays Wednesday at the Isabel Bader Theatre as part of the Human Rights Watch series before starting a regular theatrical run on Friday.
Director Lixin Fan – who will be on hand for questions at tonight's screening – is in Toronto for his film's local premiere. As the 33-year-old Chinese-Canadian filmmaker explained in an interview, this city has particular significance to him as it was the first stop in his own immigration story.
"I was passing over Scarborough while I was flying into Pearson this morning," said Fan, who is now based in Montreal. "That was the area where when I came in spring of 2006 – I lived in a basement there as a freshly landed immigrant. Being on the plane today and seeing all those houses and buildings, I did get emotional. It's been quite a journey for me personally in the past four years."
Before immigrating to Canada, Fan worked as a journalist for the Chinese broadcaster CCTV. Keeping a foot both in the official sphere and the world of independent filmmakers more willing to be critical of the state, Fan also edited To Live Is Better Than to Die, a documentary on the impact of AIDS on a rural Chinese community that was banned at home after winning several awards abroad.
Unsure of how to begin his career in Canada after landing in Toronto, he chanced upon news of a spotlight on China at that year's edition of Hot Docs. A fortuitous meeting with Montreal director Yung Chang and producer Mila Aung-Thwin led to his involvement in a documentary they were planning. The result was Chang's film Up the Yangtze, which went on to become one of the most successful Canadian documentaries of all time.
"That was only three months after I landed," Fan said, "so I really feel like I was one of the fortunate ones in the big immigrant army trying to find their dreams in Canada."
But given the many ironies of life in our globalized economy, it's not so strange that this new immigrant would repeatedly return to his previous home. Part of Fan's goal was to pay tribute to those who he believes have helped fostered the "glamorous development" that China has today yet have reaped little of the benefit.
"The migrant workers are great contributors to China's prosperity," he said. "They're the people who made it possible. Yet they don't necessarily get what they deserve; there's not enough social care or social support for this group."
Fan and his small crew spent almost three years documenting the lives of Changhua and Sugin Zhang, two factory workers in the industrial city of Guangzhou. Like tens of millions of workers, they toil to support children and other family members left back home in China's impoverished rural areas.
Fan said creating the film had more to do with waiting than shooting. "My crew and I would go to the factory day after day and just sit with the parents and talk to them about their day and their lives," he said. "We'd sleep on the piles of clothing they made and waited until they got off work, usually at midnight. We tried to blend in and gain the amount of trust we needed. That really helped to make our way into their lives and hearts."
Then there were the surreal and gruelling scenes at the local train station, where huge mobs of desperate workers spend a week or more trying to start their journeys home to celebrate Chinese New Year, often their only chance to see their families in the entire year.
Fan believes that Last Train Home's often raw emotional content is the biggest reason why audiences are connecting with his film so strongly. "I think the story is really universal," he said. "On a personal level, it's a family story. It's something that could happen anywhere in the world so people can easily relate. On another level, audiences do realize after watching the film that the lives of migrant workers have a very close relationship with our lives in the developed world. It's very easy for us to ignore the real price behind the cheap price tag of the products we consume every day."
Metro: Documentary highlights 'sad reality' of China's migrant workers
originally published at Metro
ADAM NAYMAN
METRO CANADA
February 23, 2010 5:00 a.m.
The idea that cinema represents an escape from reality receives a necessary antidote in the form of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, an annual series dedicated to films with underlying themes of social justice.
This year’s program, which runs from tomorrow to March 6 at TIFF Cinematheque, features a number of strong titles, but the clear standout is opening-night presentation Last Train Home, a Canadian documentary that follows three years in the lives of a family of Chinese migrant workers struggling to remain together as the country’s infrastructure serves to pull them apart.
“It’s a sad reality of how the country is run,” says director Lixin Fan, who will be in Toronto to introduce the HRW festival screening tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Isabel Bader Theatre.
“In China, there’s a famous saying which is difficult to translate but which means ‘Make some of the people rich first, and the rest will follow.’
“It’s trickle-down economics. So you have people working 14 hours a day at a sewing machine, sending money home to their children, who they never see, and who resent them as a result.”
This sense of resentment is embodied in the film by 17-year-old Zhang Quin, whose frustration at seeing her parents only once a year — during their annual 50-hour trek from their workplace to their rural home — boils over in a series of uncomfortably raw confrontations captured at close proximity.
“It’s not a common experience for people to have a camera following them around for three years,” says Fan. “I told them that the film wasn’t just about them, but a topic that’s larger than all of them. At the same time, I ‘don’t do anything that you don’t want to do.’”
Fan’s attempt to maintain an ethical position behind the camera is complemented by his keen directorial eye. Despite having been shot with a single camera under difficult conditions, Last Train Home is visually stunning.
The question is whether such a timely, accomplished documentary will ever screen commercially in China.
“It played at a documentary festival there last year,” says Fan. “The audience was very young, a lot of university students, many of whom had had similar experiences. One boy stood up and told me he had been crying for the entire screening. I hope we can put the film in the Chinese theatre chains, but we would be considered an ‘import’ film and they only take so many foreign films. So we would be competing with Avatar.’”
Last Train Home begins its theatrical run Friday.
ADAM NAYMAN
METRO CANADA
February 23, 2010 5:00 a.m.
The idea that cinema represents an escape from reality receives a necessary antidote in the form of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, an annual series dedicated to films with underlying themes of social justice.
This year’s program, which runs from tomorrow to March 6 at TIFF Cinematheque, features a number of strong titles, but the clear standout is opening-night presentation Last Train Home, a Canadian documentary that follows three years in the lives of a family of Chinese migrant workers struggling to remain together as the country’s infrastructure serves to pull them apart.
“It’s a sad reality of how the country is run,” says director Lixin Fan, who will be in Toronto to introduce the HRW festival screening tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Isabel Bader Theatre.
“In China, there’s a famous saying which is difficult to translate but which means ‘Make some of the people rich first, and the rest will follow.’
“It’s trickle-down economics. So you have people working 14 hours a day at a sewing machine, sending money home to their children, who they never see, and who resent them as a result.”
This sense of resentment is embodied in the film by 17-year-old Zhang Quin, whose frustration at seeing her parents only once a year — during their annual 50-hour trek from their workplace to their rural home — boils over in a series of uncomfortably raw confrontations captured at close proximity.
“It’s not a common experience for people to have a camera following them around for three years,” says Fan. “I told them that the film wasn’t just about them, but a topic that’s larger than all of them. At the same time, I ‘don’t do anything that you don’t want to do.’”
Fan’s attempt to maintain an ethical position behind the camera is complemented by his keen directorial eye. Despite having been shot with a single camera under difficult conditions, Last Train Home is visually stunning.
The question is whether such a timely, accomplished documentary will ever screen commercially in China.
“It played at a documentary festival there last year,” says Fan. “The audience was very young, a lot of university students, many of whom had had similar experiences. One boy stood up and told me he had been crying for the entire screening. I hope we can put the film in the Chinese theatre chains, but we would be considered an ‘import’ film and they only take so many foreign films. So we would be competing with Avatar.’”
Last Train Home begins its theatrical run Friday.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Globe and Mail: The human cost of a cheap shirt
originally published at The Globe and Mail:
Last Train Home follows the travails of a couple who leave their children to work 2,100 kilometres away in a garment sweatshop.
Filmmaker Lixin Fan’s documentary chronicles one Chinese family’s struggle to make ends meet as employees of a garment factory, and a whole country’s reliance on migrant workers.
by Guy Dixon
Published on Sunday, Feb. 21, 2010 6:33PM EST
Last updated on Sunday, Feb. 21, 2010 6:34PM EST
Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded and desperate, jammed in and around the train station in Guangzhou, as Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan kept his camera rolling.
The teeming mass of travellers stood packed for hours, waiting for trains that weren’t coming. Riot police and soldiers cordoned off the waves of people who were growing angrier and more panicked. In the crush, some were separated from their children. Others became hysterical. Fan’s camera caught it all.
Incredibly, this type of incident is relatively commonplace and forms the backbone for Fan’s feature documentary Last Train Home. As the film shows, the chaos in the train station has as much to do with the global economy and the Chinese-made shirt on your back, as it has to do with the annual migration of more than 130 million workers within China during the Chinese New Year holiday.
The film is already showing signs of being among this year’s prominent documentaries. Last Train Home screened at Sundance where it garnered good buzz: It’s seen as the next Up the Yangtze, which Montreal’s Eye Steel Films also produced. On Wednesday, Last Train Home opens the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in Toronto before a wider Canadian theatrical release next month.
Last Train Home focuses on the hardships caused by China’s internal mass migration. Fan distills this down to the story of one family: A middle-aged couple from Sichuan Province who leave their children to work 2,100 kilometres away in a garment sweatshop.
They implore their children, now living with their grandmother, to stay in school. But their older daughter also leaves an isolated rural life to find work sewing endless stacks of garments in a city factory.
“The internal migration is a very complicated social [phenomenon],” Fan said in Toronto last month before heading to Sundance. “Globalization has a huge impact on the lives of these migrant workers. So with all of these ideas in mind, I set out to look for one family that could represent all of these problems.”
Originally from the major central Chinese city of Wuhan, Fan worked as a news cameraman for China Central Television’s English language service. He also worked on independent Chinese documentaries, such as the acclaimed film To Live Is Better Than To Die, about an AIDS-devastated family in central China.
At CCTV’s English service, “I had a chance to travel extensively to different parts of the country to see a totally different world than I ever imagined.”
Fan’s own life is just a migratory as the subjects in his film.
In 2006, Fan uprooted and moved to Canada, living in a basement apartment in Scarborough, on the edge of Toronto. Then came a lucky break. At Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, he happened to meet the production team from Eye Steel who needed someone to join the Up The Yangtze crew who could speak a local dialect from the Three Gorges Dam area. Fan could, and he was in.
After filming ended, he stayed in China to work on his own documentary. A serious, unassuming young man, Fan simply walked into factories and introduced himself to workers sitting at sewing machines in Guangzhou. The family he settled on was cautious at first. And filming them was difficult. In one scene, the father hits his daughter, which raised ethical questions about the role of a documentary crew as mere observers.
But it was nothing compared to the difficulties and exhaustion of filming the frantic train-station scene.
“We did run into very dangerous occasions. Most of the time we were trying to keep the camera steady. But there was a chaotic moment when we are being lifted and carried away by the crowd. It’s like a torrent. You have no control over it,” Fan recalled.
“During that week, the whole country’s railway transportation system broke down due to a snowstorm…And in that week, there were 600,000 jammed in that railway station. We spent days there and just tried to stay together.”
It’s part of a phenomenon that Fan says can’t last. China simply can’t handle a migration this size. “It’s a model that cannot continue. It’s not sustainable.”
Last Train Home follows the travails of a couple who leave their children to work 2,100 kilometres away in a garment sweatshop.
Filmmaker Lixin Fan’s documentary chronicles one Chinese family’s struggle to make ends meet as employees of a garment factory, and a whole country’s reliance on migrant workers.
by Guy Dixon
Published on Sunday, Feb. 21, 2010 6:33PM EST
Last updated on Sunday, Feb. 21, 2010 6:34PM EST
Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded and desperate, jammed in and around the train station in Guangzhou, as Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan kept his camera rolling.
The teeming mass of travellers stood packed for hours, waiting for trains that weren’t coming. Riot police and soldiers cordoned off the waves of people who were growing angrier and more panicked. In the crush, some were separated from their children. Others became hysterical. Fan’s camera caught it all.
Incredibly, this type of incident is relatively commonplace and forms the backbone for Fan’s feature documentary Last Train Home. As the film shows, the chaos in the train station has as much to do with the global economy and the Chinese-made shirt on your back, as it has to do with the annual migration of more than 130 million workers within China during the Chinese New Year holiday.
The film is already showing signs of being among this year’s prominent documentaries. Last Train Home screened at Sundance where it garnered good buzz: It’s seen as the next Up the Yangtze, which Montreal’s Eye Steel Films also produced. On Wednesday, Last Train Home opens the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in Toronto before a wider Canadian theatrical release next month.
Last Train Home focuses on the hardships caused by China’s internal mass migration. Fan distills this down to the story of one family: A middle-aged couple from Sichuan Province who leave their children to work 2,100 kilometres away in a garment sweatshop.
They implore their children, now living with their grandmother, to stay in school. But their older daughter also leaves an isolated rural life to find work sewing endless stacks of garments in a city factory.
“The internal migration is a very complicated social [phenomenon],” Fan said in Toronto last month before heading to Sundance. “Globalization has a huge impact on the lives of these migrant workers. So with all of these ideas in mind, I set out to look for one family that could represent all of these problems.”
Originally from the major central Chinese city of Wuhan, Fan worked as a news cameraman for China Central Television’s English language service. He also worked on independent Chinese documentaries, such as the acclaimed film To Live Is Better Than To Die, about an AIDS-devastated family in central China.
At CCTV’s English service, “I had a chance to travel extensively to different parts of the country to see a totally different world than I ever imagined.”
Fan’s own life is just a migratory as the subjects in his film.
In 2006, Fan uprooted and moved to Canada, living in a basement apartment in Scarborough, on the edge of Toronto. Then came a lucky break. At Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, he happened to meet the production team from Eye Steel who needed someone to join the Up The Yangtze crew who could speak a local dialect from the Three Gorges Dam area. Fan could, and he was in.
After filming ended, he stayed in China to work on his own documentary. A serious, unassuming young man, Fan simply walked into factories and introduced himself to workers sitting at sewing machines in Guangzhou. The family he settled on was cautious at first. And filming them was difficult. In one scene, the father hits his daughter, which raised ethical questions about the role of a documentary crew as mere observers.
But it was nothing compared to the difficulties and exhaustion of filming the frantic train-station scene.
“We did run into very dangerous occasions. Most of the time we were trying to keep the camera steady. But there was a chaotic moment when we are being lifted and carried away by the crowd. It’s like a torrent. You have no control over it,” Fan recalled.
“During that week, the whole country’s railway transportation system broke down due to a snowstorm…And in that week, there were 600,000 jammed in that railway station. We spent days there and just tried to stay together.”
It’s part of a phenomenon that Fan says can’t last. China simply can’t handle a migration this size. “It’s a model that cannot continue. It’s not sustainable.”
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