À l'ouest des rails

It's difficult to write about this film, largely because it's a ten (is that right?) hour film if you watch the three parts as a whole, which is how I saw it - and how I recommend you to watch it. It's also difficult for me to write about it because it's been over a year since I watched the film at at the Vancouver film festival. When I saw that nobody's written a review I was kind of shocked, so I'll do my best to give readers an idea of what this film is about, as I'm sure there's more than few people who are curious about this ambitious, epic documentary. Over the course of the film, you'll encounter a very diverse and interesting group of people living through an extremely difficult point in the history of their district. I remember certain moments in the movie that really hit me hard, after being slowly built up by the slower, but not less interesting scenes that preceded them. The images gave a very objective feeling to me - the camera seemed to be this invisible object moving around within this environment and circumstances with brutal clarity and without any obvious opinion. The cinematography was great, capturing the bleak world of this industrial based community, and showing how its inhabitants transcend the bleakness through various means. Again, it's difficult to know what to say - I'd really like to watch it again - but it stood out to me as being a very important, although sometimes difficult, work of documentary art. If you get a chance, you should check this one out. When is it coming out on DVD? Criterion may want to take a look at releasing in in North America.

I really enjoyed watching this. The rawness and the honesty of the entire 3 part movie were both happy and sad. You can't help feeling for all the characters, regardless of them being interviewed or not. Everything is brutally straight forward. I recommend this to anyone wanting to see something different than your usual documentary. It might be long but it's well worth the watch.

I was born and raised up in Tie Xi, the industry zone in ShenYang city, Liao Ning, China. My father is a Central heating system engineer(Nuan Qi), which is an unique steam heating system in North China. He is one of the engineer works on the land of YanFen, the area in part three of the movie. For the rebuild of that area. This film record almost the whole life of the people like father's age in TieXi. Even though Yanfen and factory already rebuild or move to urban area, I still can remember some of them. Thanks to the staff of this film, this is a gift especial for the people born after the Industry era of Shenyang.

This could be almost anywhere in Eastern Europe in the late nineties. Any country coming out of the Eastern Block has faced this same issues, no wonder, we share the failure of Communism enforced onto whole countries. Therefore most heavy industries failed under the pressure of the many years of high volumes, huge employees numbers, ineffective technologies and means of production and steeply decreasing demand. So the numbers didn't make sense across the board. These factories had been producing at a loss for years, also during Communism. The reasons are complex, there was also systemic corruption.

Same in China, which is where the model was exported from, via Russia maybe. Not sure, but all Communist countries had very similar models and they all ended up in the same place. The difference in China is that the CCP remained, only there was clearly a political, social, economic shift that discarded whole generations of low-skilled workers that had benefitted from stable livelihoods for years. They had been raised and educated to be just that, an insignificant cog in the machine, keeping it running. Only the machine became useless and was torn apart and scrapped, along with every single piece.

This is a very convoluted way of saying that as a Romanian this documentary is not showing me anything new. Apart from the fact that I have never seen this done on such a scale in Romania, everything else is familiar and quite logical. The local colour is what is interesting to me here, the workers' discussions, their concerns, hobbies, beliefs. Some of these snippets of conversation are true gems, but not all. It's still long, very long, although the latter half of this first part was more dynamic and interesting for me, featuring more conversations and more progression towards the inevitable end of the smelting factory. For instance one worker describes his school days. They didn't learn anything and weren't made to. Their teachers were forced to pass all students (same as in Romania under Communism) and consequently he can barely read. In the first half another worker laments that currently their children have to be very good students and get a good education so they can get a good job. There is no good job with just a junior high school education, which is what their generation had. They openly discuss their managers, bosses, management corruption and even the indifference and callousness of the CCP, which is surprising to see on film. These were men that didn't give a damn anymore. They knew they were on film.

And although most of them are family men who are worried about their families, they play cards, mahjong, they visit or talk about visiting prostitutes, steal supplies and whatever they can and generally spend a lot of time in the break rooms. It's true though that production has decreased to a minimum, as some of them explain. It looks like some of them come to work to socialize more than to work and they are routinely sent home for various periods of time. The public baths look very dirty, the protection equipment looks useless, there is so much dust and fumes and they speak openly about the toxicity in the factory. Lead smelting workers have to spend a month in the hospital, several times a year, to have the lead taken out of their blood, which sounds very gruesome, but also is pretty ineffective in the long run I'm sure. Somebody says even their children have lead in their blood. They are just regular people very much a product of the environment they have been put and kept in for whole decades of carefully curated ideology that ultimately failed. It was time for something new. New industries, new kind of factories, new money, probably the same bosses that had gotten rich on the backs of these people and these outdated factories.

I don't know if the following two parts are pretty much more of the same. I will see. I will try to watch them in full, as found on YouTube. I understand the value of these docs for the Chinese society, they have evidentiary value, but I don't think the public needs to watch nine hours of this. It will remain a cult classic probably, but could have reached a wider audience with better editing. There is a lot of amazing dialogue in this, but I see Wang Bing tends to make long documentaries.

The second part of the documentary is more dynamic and focuses on the private lives of the families affected by the factory closures and bankruptcies and forceful relocation due to state sanctioned redevelopment. And that part is something I am not familiar with in my country, unlike the events of the first part.

For the most part is zeroes in on the younger generation, the future so to speak, the children of these out of work people, all living up to three generations in very run-down, makeshift houses, that look more like barracks than permanent houses. They've been living here for decades clearly, they're probably made improvements and expansions, but these still look like rural dwellings at best. It's hard to believe these are vast parts of an industrial town. Some of them are rented out or given to the workers, some are owned by them. They have brick walls, but the insides are pretty rudimentary, there's no flooring, they heat them by burning wood. The alleys are muddy, dirty and cluttered and difficult to navigate in the winter on which it opens. It's hard to believe anyone would want to live here, but the sad part is that they don't want to leave because they don't know where they will live after that. At the end some say they're received small flats and it's not enough space for all family members. They feel duped by the rules of the relocation office, who measured their inside living space instead of the entire structural space. There's of course intimidation, thugs sent to drive away those who do not want to move, bribes to get a better apartment and so on.

They destroy their own houses or those abandoned to get wood, scraps of metal to sell, anything. Some guys demolish a roof and you can see how precarious the structure is - timber, mud, plastic foil and a metal pipe here and there. Must be freezing in winter, anyway they always wear their coats inside when they are filmed.

As for those young people, who knows where they are now and what they're doing, they're my age... There's this guy Bobo, who's supposed to be 17, but looks like 35, chasing after a girl who won't give him the time of day, rightfully so, he's practically harassing the poor girl, but I get the feeling that's how courtship looks to these people. They hang around, laugh, talk crap, nothing serious, no mention of school or the future, they're clearly aimless, hopeless and futureless. At some point some of them mention odd jobs, contract jobs, finishing some trade school that didn't teach them anything.

It's a little dystopic, only it's real. Feels very real and kind of tragic. It's sad to be living like this and become accustomed to it and even to want it to go on. Even more tragic that they might fall much lower than this now that most of them have no steady income.