Up the Yangtze

This cinema masterpiece is experience of Chinese not westerner story. I hope you will go to take in this experience and learn more about middle kingdom. This movie is fair and shows piece of Chinese life. Do not miss this masterpiece. It made me laugh it made me cry. It made me think about my homeland.

this is from variety Asia online: "If the title "Up the Yangtze!" suggests "up a creek!," it's no coincidence. China's Three Gorges Dam is considered by many experts to be a full-steam-ahead eco-disaster, but helmer Yung Chang's gorgeous meditation is more concerned with the project's collateral human damage: old farmers evicted, young people in servitude to Western tourists, all brought about by an endeavor whose collective weight may ultimately tilt the Earth's axis. A gloriously cinematic doc of epic, poetic sadness, "Yangtze" should be a hit on the specialized circuit and could break out, thanks to its embrace of irony rather than righteous indignation."

i think this review is right. i'm very happy for this film and i think, as a Chinese, it is important to see all of the sides of our story. that way we can grow to learn to be better.

Sorry if you were looking for Wall-E or something else 'feel good', this is a documentary focusing on two young people at the center of change in China. The Three Gorges Dam, at the time of filming was beginning to flood areas where about 2 million people were being displaced, as we are told, for the good of the country, which appears a phrase parroted enough in the belief it will come true.

'Jerry' is a Have, while 'Cindy' is a 'have not.' Both seek employment on a cruise ship for western tourists. Little is told of Jerry's family, which is apparently better off than Cindy's, which the film focuses on. Cindy's family are poor farmers who are doing fairly well, but know everything will change when their home and fields will be flooded. The hardship of change is clear and Cindy works hard to help support her family. Jerry doesn't show the same work ethic, which leaves the viewer to draw their own conclusion of traditional vs. modern values.

Quite a lot of detail on modern China is available to the viewer, including frequent complaints of corruption. I was moved considerably by the contrasts and the snips of history, which show not all have prospered in modern China, though there is again parroted belief that anyone can succeed. It was also a bit surprising to see in China High School education is not a given for everyone.

I found this to be a very informative and well done documentary and highly recommend it to anyone wishing to see the changes and impact of this dubious national project.

Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang's National Film Board of Canada-sponsored documentary about the displacement of the Yangtze river and the population surrounding it by the Three Gorges Dam in China creates a vivid picture of people and transitions. But it's got a tough act to follow in the films of Jia Zhang-ke, whose recent 'Still Life' goes over similar ground in a style that feels at once more sweeping and more intimate.

Chang mainly alternates between a big "luxury cruise" boat that takes North Americans and Europeans to see the river landscape before flooding changes everything, and a poor family living in an improvised riverside shack that's shabby but is in a place where there is land they can cultivate for food. In the course of the film, the family is moved up to temporary housing where they have to buy food and water and their sixteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to continue beyond middle school, struggles and makes her way up from dishwasher to dining room help on the boat. Meanwhile Chang also follows another new boat worker called "Jerry" (Chen Bu Yu) who washes out after his trial period despite being handsome and a good singer. He is accused by his supervisor of being over-confident, egotistical, and careless of others, which some Chinese think is a common byproduct of one-child families.

'Up the Yangtze' is skillfully edited by Hannele Halm to underline social contrasts . It moves seamlessly back and forth between "Cindy" (as the subsistence farmer's daughter, Shui Yu, is called for her boat job) and her family's shack. We see "Jerry" boasting, drinking and swearing at a Karaoke bar before beginning his boat job. He interacts smoothly with a couple of young European men while bartending on the boat, and performs a Chinese song for an assembled audience of the tourists on board. The workers' supervisor, "Campbell" (Ping He) gives them lots of instructions.

Symbolically, Chang's extensive coverage of life on the cruise boat among the young workers and their supervisors, who teach them how to tell tourists what they want to hear and not bring up controversial subjects, is a vision of China's desire to make nice with the western world on its upward path to being one of the leading nations. At the same time, this cruise boat story seems somehow peripheral to general Chinese life. Jia's 'Still Life,' with its haunting fiction of several different lives disrupted by the Three Gorges project, gives a more vivid sense of the turmoil and unpredictability of contemporary China and more specific detail about the shifting interface between people and the dam's ongoing displacements. The cruise boat story in 'Up the Yangtze' has its richer counterpoint in Jia's previous film, 'The World,' and he presented a portrait of several decades of contemporary Chinese history in his second feature film, the 2000 'Platform.' In 'Unknown Pleasures' (2002), Jia dramatized the marginal lives of semi-educated young people (like Cindy) who are caught in the swirl of transformation of the rural into the urban in China's vast economic cauldron.

But Chang seems to have had excellent access to each of the worlds he chooses to focus on, and particularly to the sense of humiliation and grief some people feel in the course of things. This includes Cindy, before she leaves home; a shopkeeper who was brutally relocated; and Jerry when he begins to realize that his coworkers don't like him because he's not a team player. Chang was able to film Cindy's parents explaining why they can't send her on to further schooling, and their humble visit to the boat after she's been working there a while. Jerry seems to have characteristics that would serve him well in a western setting or a school. But though he comes from a richer family than Cindy, such opportunities are unreachable even at nineteen, and when he's banished from the river boat job, one wonders if he may end up like the young lost souls in Jia's 'Unknown Pleasures,' who face jail or worse.

In 'Still Life' it's clear that people at all levels are being churned around in China, and since English is Chang's first language, it's quite possible "Up the Yangtze" is meant to evoke the words "up the river." It seems that the only value that survives is the intense desire to work and no one can really see the big picture, even though they may supervise the construction of big bridges or buildings. The recent earthquake in China is a new demonstration that planning and construction are often faulty. Since Chang's film is a documentary, you may wonder why nobody is asked whether there wouldn't have been an alternative to the giant dam with its disruption of a vast eco-system and displacement of two million people and counting. But nobody does, and Chang's access doesn't mean he could talk to policy-makers, or even mid-level bureaucrats. Like many documentarians, he has worked very well with the material that came his way. He also refers to his own family stories and trips to the area of the river--this isn't his first. The film has a strong but not obtrusive soundtrack by Olivier Alary; the cinematography of Wang Shi Qing is often striking. Jia's 'Still Life' remains a hard act to follow.

Shown at Sundance, Seattle, San Francisco and other festivals, currently (June 2008) in US release in 6 theaters.

For such a slow paced documentary, you might at first doubt it's ability to draw you in. Initially, I watched the film because I somehow expected it to be one man's journey into the depths of China. But, no, it's not really about that. Instead of diving into China as a geographical location, "Up the Yangtze" concerns itself with the culture and politics of modern China as it affects the average citizen.

Two characters are central to this documentary's narrative. 'Cindy' who lives with her family in a shack beside the rapidly rising river, and 'Jerry' who comes from a higher standard of life in the city. They both find themselves working on a cruise ship which goes up and down the Yangtze river. The passages which deal directly with the ship and ship's passengers are rather revealing. The tourists come off largely as self-absorbed and unimaginative people with far too much money. They seem to all share peculiarly uninterested attitudes. This comes in rather stark contrast to the locals' acute awareness of their situation.

There are several interviews throughout the course of the film that reveal a darker side than might first be visible. This is particularly poignant during an interview carried on with a shopkeeper while a heated argument goes on outside.

Certain limitations are apparent in such a focused documentary, but it's very interesting and more than worth your attention.

RATING: 7.0 out of 10

"Up the Yangtze" is a documentary which is at its heart, about a poor Chinese family and the impact the Three Gorges Dam project is having on their lives. In a broader sense it is about a rapidly changing China and the huge disparity in rich & poor that exists there.

The Three Gorges Dam is a colossal hydroelectric project. The hydro plant on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, "wonder of the world", generates 2,300 MW of electricity. The Three Gorges project will be 26,000 MW, a dam two km wide, and when complete will displace 2 million people and empty about 9 large cities.

One such displaced family is featured in the film. The daughter of the family goes to work on a cruise ship on the Yangtze which caters to rich Westerners. The story is told from the point of view of the daughter, and various people we meet along the trip.

The film made me laugh, and cry a couple of times too. (Which was embarrassing because I watched it on an Air Canada flight to Vancouver) If you want to get a little window on what is going on in China right now, the corruption of officials, the disparity between rich and poor, the treatment of peasants by the government, beyond the newspaper headlines, then this film is for you.