Chinese Docu
Winner of multiple prizes including Best Feature Documentary at IDFA 2009 and a Golden Gate Award at the 2010 San Francisco Film Festival, Last Train Home depicts the chaos that befalls urban China every spring.
Annually, 130 million migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year’s holiday. It is the world’s largest human migration—an epic spectacle that reveals a country caught between its rural past and industrial future. The number of migrants is unusually high (they amount tom over one third of the U.S. population).
This extraordinary film, a striking feature debut by Lixin Fan, depicts a couple of married migrant Chinese factory workers, who make an unusually arduous journey once a year to see the parents and the children they have left behind.
Working over several years in classic verité style (and with the producers of the hit documentary Up the Yangtze) Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan travels with one couple who have embarked on this annual trek for almost two decades.
Emotionally engaging and starkly beautiful, the film offers intimate observations of one fractured family, shedding light on the human cost of China’s ascendance as an economic superpower. It’s hard to think of another film that captures so vividly and painfuly the human price paid in the country’s rapid process of modernization.
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