Der letzte Zug

'Last Train Home' is a particularly sad and wearying example among a number of documentaries about human upheaval and the destruction of traditions and family values in today's China. A hundred and twenty million Chinese workers in far-flung places hurry back home every Chinese New Year, a vast temporary "migration," and the only time in the year divided families are reunited. Using the microcosm approach, the Canadian-Chinese filmmaker Lixan Fan chronicles the vicissitudes of this massive journey and the impact of separations for the rest of the year by latching onto one small family, the Zhangs, who come from a farm in a remote area. The parents of two children, Chen Suqin and her husband Zhang Changhua, left sixteen years ago to earn money to support the kids working in the big industrial city of Guangzhou in the south.

The family was dirt poor, the grandmother tells us. She and her late husband were left with the task of raising Chen's and Changhua's daughter Qin and younger son Yang. Yang is in school, fifth in the class, which his parents don't like. He should be number one. "I don't want to work too hard," he says. What does he care? His parents only come to tell him this once a year, at the time of that vast New Years "migration." Yang, Qin, and their parents aren't often in touch. They don't have cell phones.

In the case of teenage daughter Qin, the resentment is huge. She outspokenly declares that her parents abandoned her for most of her young life and she can't forgive them for this. She feels the country is a "sad place." This leads to the deepest irony of the film because she quits school to go away and work first in a garment factory, later in a cocktail bar in a boom town. This despite the fact that the purpose of her parents going away to work was so she and her brother could rise above peasant or laborer status through better education. It doesn't look like Qin is going to do that.

Yang is in middle school. Those words of his justifying fifth place in class, however, show that he, like Qin, is probably abandoning the traditional values of hard work and sacrifice -- values that fueled China's economic boom, but now are being undermined by it. Because of the boom, evident everywhere, even the poorest of the poor are seduced by glitzy fantasies of easy wealth and giddy fun. And the enormous displacements caused by the boom in themselves make the Chinese family structure grow weaker.

The film seamlessly follows Qin and her parents and documents several of the New Years migrations. The trip begins with days of struggle to get tickets and the last trip teeters on the verge of becoming a humanitarian disaster. Masses of people wait in the station for five days, herded by cops. This is when Chunghua has gone to see Qin and persuade her to come back with them. He and Suqin are hoping Qin will go back to school. Instead, perhaps because of the enormous stresses of the journey, the film descends into Jerry Springer territory upon arrival and in front of Grandma and the camera father and daughter have a huge verbal and physical fight. Qin addresses her father in foul and abusive language and he beats her, and she strikes back. Later Qin goes elsewhere and the film shows her briefly working in a huge noisy cocktail bar, which is crudely contrasted by rapid crosscutting with the parents' numbing sweatshop work and the quietude and beauty of the farmland from whence they all came. The cocktail waitress phase recalls another Canadian documentary about China, Chang Yung's award-winning 'Up the Yangtze,' a film on which Lixin Fan, a Canadian who immigrated from China, worked as associate producer, translator and sound recordist. 'Up the Yangtze' focuses on human upheavals caused by the Three Gorges Dam, as does Jia Zhang-ke's fictional 'Still Life.' Another semi-documentary about social change in China that has earned much praise is Jia's '24 City.'

Nothing can equal the magic of 'Still Life' or Jia Zhang-ke's other films about modern China. The family interchanges in 'Up the Yangtze' were similar to 'Last Train's,' but were more subtle and hopeful. The impression that remains from Lixin Fan's film is the sullen defiance of the children and the weariness in the parents' faces, and the skillful documentation of the horrific crowds cramming into holiday trains. A documentarian sticks with his or her subjects, and Fan does this faithfully, but one may perhaps be forgiven for wishing a more interesting, articulate family had been chosen. Because there is no narration, you would have to read the press kit that goes with the film to know that the Zhangs were prevented by law from taking their children with them; that migrant workers like the Zhangs are cruelly discriminated against; and that a large number of them, perhaps a third, are girls 17-25 years old, like Qin.

A few brief interviews with young men on the migrants' New Years train are glimpses of a broader view. One man says he works at a place stringing tennis rackets for all the major foreign brands, but that China has no tennis racket brand of its own. We are just a country of suppliers, he says, and we get paid the minimum price. Despite its boom economy China is still full of very poor, exploited people: the whole country is like one giant exploited migrant worker .

'Last Train Home' won the Best Feature-Length Documentary award at the 22nd International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and was nominated for a similar award at Sundance. It was shown at the March-April New Directors/New Films series at Lincoln Center and MoMA in New York.

Lixin Fan's magnificent 'Last Train Home' is an observational documentary of the very highest standard. The subject is important and gripping - the experiences of migrant workers in modern China. We follow one family in particular who have left their teenage daughter and a son behind in the country while they work in the factories of the south. The skill of Lixin Fan is remarkable as he captures their experiences and this is a very moving film. There was one scene which I found particularly memorable where the father, a largely silent and disillusioned man, strikes his daughter repeatedly because he feels she does not appreciate what he and his wife have done for her. She turns to the camera and screams something like 'so you see? This is the real me'. What are we to think? Is she selfish and ungrateful or should we side with her against parents who abandoned her? I saw the film in Shanghai in June with Lixin Fan present. It was a great privilege. This is a modern documentary masterpiece and a sign of the strength of Chinese documentary film making.

While the problem of migrant workers exists all over the world, in China the problem is particularly acute. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at 130 million, approximately 9% of the population. The migrant worker's working and living conditions in the cities are precarious with most unskilled workers working ten to twelve hour days and having one or two days off a month without benefits, pensions, or health insurance.

Until recently the children of migrant workers were kept out of urban schools and high fees still prevent them from entering schools, so most migrant workers leave their children at home in the countryside. They grow up there with grandparents or other relatives and grow estranged from their parents, of¬ten seeing them only once a year, usually during the Chinese New Year. Despite these many problems, the migrant workers continue to come to the cities, because for many staying in the villages is no longer an alternative.

Lixin Fan's revealing documentary Last Train Home is not a film about economics but about humanity and the personal toll families of migrant workers must endure. Last Train Home is the first 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. The film focuses on five members of the Zhang family whom the director met when touring a denim factory in Guangdong province, shooting 300 hours of footage over a period of several years as he became almost a member of the family.

Fan reveals that the Zhang's left their home in the countryside sixteen years ago just after the birth of their daughter to work in the factories of Guangdong province, making cheap goods for the West and only return home once a year for a few days during New Year. Along with 140 million other migrant workers, this is often the only occasion in which they can spend time with their children and parents. The story is about the Zhang's attempt to leave the city to journey to their countryside home while having to fight the inhuman crush of workers who crowd into Guangdong's dirty railway station to secure tickets. It is not a pretty picture.

The trip covers more than 2,000 kilometers and it is an exhausting and stressful journey by train, bus, and ferry. When they finally arrive, they are able to spend only a few days with their son Yang (10) and daughter Qin (17), who have grown up under the care of their grandparents and who they hardly know. During the last ten years, Qin has become resentful at never seeing her parents, even though the economic necessity of the arrangement is self-evident. The parents' only conversation is to tell the children to study hard but they show no interest in what they are studying or exploring with them their areas of weakness. In a rebellious frame of mind, Qin decides to leave school and go to work in a factory just like her parents, thinking that that is the path to freedom.

During one visit, adolescent acting out together with lack of parenting skills erupt into an ugly physical confrontation between father and daughter over her use of the "f" word, an altercation that could have easily been avoided if either one had shown some emotional maturity. "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." Last Train Home was shown at the Guangzhou Documentary Film Festival last year and it was an emotional experience.

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, he said, had to give up school and go to work in the factory so he could continue studying. While the Zhang family shows much determination and resilience, their story has basically little upside to it. In exploring the dark side of the Chinese economic miracle, Last Train Home has plenty of tunnels along the journey but little light at their end.

I was born in GuangZhou, China, where the movie was partially made. I worked with those who left hometown to China big cities to work. Given that, i can tell you that the movie is telling us a real story, and showing a true face of The GuangZhou Railway station. For more than 10 years, one horrible place to visit is the GuangZhou Railway Station---dirty, crowded, a lot of thieves, toilets not enough...

I guess this movie is very for for us to show the next generation who would be brought up in Canada. They then shall understand why GuangZhou people are eager to go overseas. This movie is also good for those who never visit China, as most of the time, the medias tend to show the good stories, not the truth.

There is a brief scene in this semi-documentary where one of the workers working on an immense pile of blue jeans for import to the U.S. laughs at the enormous waistline--a 40! He comments that only in America are there enough people who could fill so many of those jeans; I was in Costco two days later, and one of those folks was behind me in line , cart crammed with huge portions of food, loudly complaining because the line wasn't moving fast enough for her. I wanted give her a copy of this tender, sad, revealing true story about people waiting in line, sometimes in the rain, for five days just to catch a train for their once a year vacation, usually to visit children they have left behind so that can earn enough money for the kids to live well and educate themselves and move ahead. Even with the mountain of personal and financial problems the family shares, their essential humanity shines through, and as with families all over the planet, they just want things to be better for their children. This is a penetrating and thoughtful film about a nation that doesn't know how to handle its sudden growth and power, and is about the results of such power that often impact the victims of the system