A Beautiful Way to Die

Western Sahara Desert between circa 5200 and 2500 BC:

The skeletons of this exceptionally suggestive triple burial at Gobero are preserved in such a cast exactly as discovered by Dr. Paul Sereno, chief explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society. The three people died without any sign of skeletal injury.

This may be the single most astonishing human death, ever. Evidence like this forcefully indicates our success as a social species. Notwithstanding the horrendous catastrophes caused by us throughout the millennia, any instant or absurd argument about us being innately violent seems unsupportable herein.

Last Train Home: A Longer Review

Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s debut film Last Train Home is a feature documentary heroically depicting an unfathomable immensity by intimately focusing on the story of a single family caught in the largest mass migration on earth. Opening overhead shots show a huge mob waiting in the Guangzhou Train Station to push their way into their annual New Year’s journey home – a cultural spectacle made by 130 million some migrant urban workers in modern China. Fan then picks up on the struggle waged by the Zhangs, a married couple working together in a Guangzhou garment factory as sewing-machine operators, to reunite with their teenage children in a Sichuan village 1,300 miles away. Within no time, the film artistically establishes its motif of one migrant worker’s family’s struggle viewed as microcosm for the macrocosm of a rapidly modernizing China, a country marching towards accelerated economic development and global economic dominance at the expense of losing many of its traditional ways and values. Tense or intense, credible or incredible, Fan’s superbly realized docudrama reaches the audience with an unflinching eye for the seeable and a compassionate heart for unseeable.

The film opens in the winter of 2006 in Guangzhou – the sprawling capital of Guangdong, the southernmost province in China, where we meet Changhua Zhang and wife, Suqin Chen. With New Year’s looming, they are desperately seeking train tickets to their home in a small village in Sichuan, the most populous province in China, a place they left their two children 16 years ago. The Zhangs’ daughter Qin has halfway passed her rebellious teenage-hood, and their son Yang enjoys school more than his sister does. If the Zhangs’ ticket searching goes successful, it will be the family’s first reunion in 12 months. Although the Zhangs have rationalized their prolonged absence and the resultant estrangement from their children, especially Qin, the price to be paid to ensure that Qin and Yang stay in school, and thus can have at least the prospect of a better future, does not come to Qin’s understanding. Qin does not appreciate her parents’ sacrifice, and thereof ditches school, leaving her brother and grandmother in Sichuan, and too going south to find a job in another garment factory in the same city. As the Zhangs try to mend a family torn apart by Qin’s decision while pressuring her to return to Sichuan and resume her schooling before her eighteenth birthday, they invite her to accompany them home for the New Year. To get there, however, they must first pass the portals of the Guangzhou Train Station with an ocean of people – indeed their coworkers in South China. It is from here Fan’s film hits its visual peak by ceasing such a sensational yet claustrophobic urban setting, often with exasperation, and always with exhaustion. When the depleted family finally does reach their village home, the respite is not restful and respectful, as an argument between father and daughter devolves into violence, at certainly the film’s emotional zenith. The film ends openly on the mother’s determined mission home to take care of the son and the grandmother, and to seek righteousness or forgiveness and to give new hope a faultless chance.

Last Train Home begins with large numbers – the 130 some million Chinese migrant workers who return home for the New Year’s holiday annually in the world’s largest human migration, and the 2,100 kilometers that separate the Zhang family during the rest of the year, yet once it has hit the audience with those, it narrows the focus considerably and deliberately as to how such a subsistent pattern in modern China affects one otherwise invisible family that proves a perfect, sometimes disturbing sample of the population at large. Last Train Home structures its narrative around a key section in the Chinese calendar – New Year, which is not only a symbol but also an important reminder of the last stronghold of Chinese traditions that have been withering rapidly with the invasion of Western culture. In the words of one poor traveller, “If the family can’t even celebrate New Year’s together, life would be pointless.” This annual trip is both of necessity and of liberty in its motivation, and both existential and spiritual in its devotion.

The technical and stylistic merit of Last Train Home is spectacular. The establishing shots of the crowded train station and factories, in addition to the panoramic shots of the city, of the train running through the long snowy mountain, and of the tranquil stillness of the country’s rurality, all inspire a sense of astounding sociocultural complexity and geographic expanse of China. In a sense, this film aims to capture rural China – a country has not changed in her history – while of enough consciousness and conscience seeks to understand urban China. What Fan does here is subtly visualizing such a tremendous rural-urban conflict against a superficially rapid social and economic advancement in China; his unique cinematography forcefully and convincingly builds a contrast between two institutionally different worlds coexisting in a torrent of change in China. Almost every frame of Last Train Home is stunningly photographed and expertly constructed; it reveals the solid labor of a sensitive filmmaker and humanist having immersed himself in the lives of his subjects to explore the story of some of their most intimate yet costly moments. And, the result thereby is incredibly salient and ultimately symbolic of a much broader perspective. A documentary can never be or duplicate the real world, yet importantly Fan’s film “captures what few other films have: the suffocating density of China’s population, the sheer weight of its many social and economic problems, and the unavoidable sense that a single human life here can hardly matter” (Chan 2010). Indeed, Last Train Home aspires to rely on its visual spiritedness to recite its own kind of poetry, and does that splendidly and estimably on every possible execution, whether arranged or improvised.

Taking a deeper look at Last Train Home, this film edges every layer of human emotion with vivid desperation and helplessness. Although China’s current status as an economic powerhouse regularly makes front-page news, stories about her constant struggles to manage crises that seem to grow directly out of frustrations among her most disenfranchised citizens are none less than extraordinary. The two exhausting holiday journeys the Zhangs have to take represent their only efforts as culturally qualified Chinese parents, yet such hopeless efforts are their only agonies as both parents and migrant workers in modern China. When the Zhangs have been unable even to secure tickets for their first multi-day trip, their agonies show; yet, when they do, the tickets still will not assure them a place on the unreliable and overfull trains, their agonies saturate. It is this defining moment that the film releases its true rationale. Those stressed and harrowing scenes at the Guangzhou Train Station, which are indelible chapters of Last Train Home, simply deliver a truth that is too agonizing to keep alive, as the film’s camera crew, and also audience, are swept up in such a miserable human tide. Nevertheless, there is something far more noteworthy within. In the film Titanic, as the aged Rose remembers the majestic sinking of Titanic while looking at its computer-generated animation, she says “Thank you for that forensic analysis, but, of course, the experience of it was…quite different.” However arduous Fan’s documentary may have been to shoot, it is always infinitely more arduous to live, both for filmmakers and for film’s subjects. Like migrant workers elsewhere, and probably everywhere, the Zhangs are being exploited and deprived; for 16 years, the couple has sent money home to support the two children being raised only by a peasant grandmother. Their same-time-next-year relation with their children is not of their choice, and is thus doomed to a boil precisely in time to be documented by Fan. Fan’s lens always knows time. It sees the haunting beauty of the nation’s rural side while also sensing the remarkable achievements – railways, tunnels, factories, and all kinds of upgrading – bought by sweats, tears, lost love, missing hope, and extremely cheap wages. The film is in the end about modern China, about the label “Made in China”, about rapid globalization, about the increased rural-urban conflict, about the sociocultural transformation and geopolitical development in developing countries within the current global economic environment, and surely about the impacts those changes have made to each and every individual of those countries.

To illustrate all such aspects in the most sensible and intimate way possible, Fan takes further steps. What he does excellently here is to manage to insinuate himself into the Zhangs’ lives to a rather remarkable extent, and to present everything in smallest details and sharpest nuances. This is unerringly the kind of ethnographic participant observation an anthropologist may bring in the field, and this is particularly well rendered in the third act of the film. During the first act of the film, an older generation is seen left to the backbreaking, and barely sustainable, habitual task of farming, while raising two children, and such presumably is the optimized option for the Zhangs, but the sprain on the Zhangs is clear: the grandmother is determined but unwell; the younger son is restless and misses mom and dad; the elder daughter boils in her an upward resentment for her parents. Eventually and almost inevitably, it is the daughter’s spirit that cracks, shown in a scene in the third act that is as blunt, utterly unpredictable, and completely powerful as cinema can be. The abovementioned moment of confrontation: the violence continues when reunited father and daughter wind up brawling in grandma’s kitchen. “You want to film the real me – this is the real me!” Qin shouts as the camera continues to document the humiliated family. It seems, at least as edited, that it has been intimate for Qin to trust Fan and his crew that much. Kenneth Turan says in his review (2010) that “[as] an expert, unobtrusive observer, Fan disappears inside his own film and allows us to get completely inside his subjects’ lives”. He comments that “although it’s clear that a family conflict is brewing, how it plays out in terms of fearsome confrontations and confounding of parental expectations is remarkably honest, painful and involving” (Turan 2010). A brief but essential sequence near the end of the film reveals several absorbed young nightclub workers, including Qin, watching the televised Olympic opening ceremonies, and all of them burst into tears. Fan rarely evokes direct or deliberate commentary, yet here he touches the very bottom of the abyss of second generation migrant workers’ spiritual emptiness and blindness of their comfort zone and status quo. Throughout Last Train Home, Qin’s choices possess a valiant strength as well as hopefulness to them; her sense of justice and destiny is inspiring, and her will stronger than her parents’. Nevertheless, her chronicle, along with her parents’, is devastating to watch, and therefore represents the tragically cyclical nature of many social problems caused by a fast-paced globalizing era. Fan understands that the Zhangs, who represent millions of migrant workers in China, have left their rural farms for the grinding struggle of life in urban factories in China’s de facto socioeconomic norms, while immeasurably suggesting that life in either setting is extremely difficult, as he and his camera witness everything firsthand.

Moreover, there are numerous instances in Last Train Home where conscientious details not just count but get gradually absorbed in a wider whole. Particularly, the colossal translation of Sichuanese into English triumphs admirably. At most, the flawed translation is required to comprehend the storyline; at least, the well-tempered translation serves to make sense to many idioms and slangs not opportunely translatable. For example, what instigates the confrontation between the father and the daughter is the daughter’s deliberate use of the vulgar word – laozi, which is in fact a first-person pronoun used mostly by rugged men to address themselves. Lao means old, zi can mean a man’s social status; hereby laozi means old man, which contextually and functionally means “your old man”. Therefore, when a Chinese man says “Laozi wants to drink” he means “I want to drink.” Although the pronoun laozi is semantically masculine, and thus should be used by men exclusively, women do use that to express their power or strength. Nonetheless, if laozi is used by children in front of their parents, or kin and even nonkin of the same generation, it is deemed an outrageous disgrace, almost of taboo. Hence, when Qin yells laozi so callously to her father in the film, she infuriates her mother, angers her usually tender grandmother, and would surprise any Chinese who is watching. Notwithstanding here, laozi is conveniently translated to “fuck”, which, albeit its inaccuracy, works almost as good as literal translation. Of course, Fan hears that, knows its profound cultural undertone, and includes this vital part into his final cut. Visual facets are certainly the most important part of this film, and Fan knows this too well. He strings many shots of the urban chaos of Guangzhou and the rural tranquility of China’s southwest landscape, of rushing mass and crying individuals, of ageing parents’ anguish and despair, and most strikingly of adolescent daughter’s rebelliousness and stubbornness together to tell a story that is both universal – children do misunderstand parents’ sacrifices and parents forgot what it is like to be a teenager – and rather particular to a changing China. Furthermore, the soundtrack of the film is outstanding. To augment the melancholy and the emotional bleakness, a prepared piano has been made to sing the unspeakable and unseeable. The score, while minimal in form and minimalist in style, is indeed contextually maximizing in effect. The occasionally added pop and dance music appropriately enhances the authentic flavor of each scene or sequence.

Last Train Home is an uncompromising portrayal of the Chinese migrant workers’ tired eyes, fried bodies, and frayed tempers at the train station before the New Year, as well as an honoring celebration of the resilience, determination, and optimism of China’s people. Already an award-winner at several documentary festivals, Last Train Home stands as an impressive feature debut from now a harbinger of greater documentary cinema – Lixin Fan. Fan, who has made seven trips to China and spent three years working on Last Train Home, has, in making this grand and often astonishing film, calculated the human cost of the miraculous economic growth in China by mapping a single family dysfunction, or indeed, tragedy presumably multipliable by millions. In sheer cinematic élan, Last Train Home follows the Zhangs’ hope for one New Year to finally reconcile with his family, yet their love and sacrifice of 16 years have fulfilled nothing but pure misery and agony, disinterestedly induced by China’s new social reality. The Zhangs’ story tells the sort of change that China is going through at the juncture between traditions and breaks with tradition.

Reference:

Chan, Andrew (2010) Review of Last Train Home. Film Comment 46(5):71.

Turan, Kenneth (2010) Review of Last Train Home. Los Angeles Times, September 17: Entertainment.

Jeremy: A Review

Not often do all the elements of a film – the screenplay, the cast, the cinematography, the music, the production design, and the editing – come together in perfect harmony in as short as half an hour, and deliver an emotionally powerful experience that renews faith in the art of cinema. Yet, such a result can be found in many frames of Brian Faye’s 31-minute film Jeremy, which is the rare visualization of spiritual alienation and the importance of faith.

Jeremy is quite a cinematic gem that, at one point, follows a fairly straightforward yet well-trodden narrative to a simple conclusion and, at another, indulges in a shred of tightly-woven plot lines to transform a monotonous story into something of a spiritual revelation beyond its conventional storyline. The artistic maturity and mastery of Faye for his cinematic aptitude to utterly captivate audience and shine new light on the universal aspects of faith is enormous. A conventional character study or religion-themed melodrama would spend the majority of time and plot on the architecture of its storyline. What distinguishes Jeremy from that is its axis of drama being defined not by plots, but by the main character’s psychological development and emotional growth toward maturity – a coming-of-age story hold in deceptively fast pace.

Moreover, Jeremy represents an unmarked film genre that sets out to construct a world of its own. Although the film’s obvious reliance on the aesthetic spirit of any American independent film makes its relationship with the independent or art-house genre stereotypically labeled, it is its unique spiritual sympathy and depth with which the motif of Jeremy is fully explored, which nevertheless produces much of its powerful impact. Indeed a film like Jeremy has very little to do with genre because the context and nuance provided by the story suggest a freeness of style throughout the film. Thus, it is an independent film in all meaningful perspectives.

The film tells the inspiring story of Jeremy, who, when his incarcerated father is transferred to a distant prison, begins a new, lonesome, “fatherless” life with his game show-addicted mother and two violent half-brothers. Constantly disappointed by the mistreat of his half-brothers and by the unfulfilled promises made by his mother’s boyfriend – the only possible father-figure in his life, and breathlessly trapped in the bleakest trailer park in western Texas most of his life, Jeremy finally stops his search for happiness in the household, and begins to find spiritual enlightenment in the Bible and in a local church. The choice of his costs him repeated mockeries and ridicules from the half-brothers and the money to buy him new clothes from his mother. In a tranquil yet desolate landscape and atmosphere, Jeremy’s life is about to change all for the good, as he scours heaven and earth for love and light, the kind that he desperately craves.

Faye wrote Jeremy too, and it is a masterful and lyrical screenplay, with sparse yet authentic dialogues. At the center of the story is a mounting yearning for spiritual enrichment, not being directly told to the audience, but instead unfolding with very unhurried grace, which beautifully captures the rhythm of the deprived rural setting like poetry offering respite from its bleakness and gleaming smoothly. There are many sophisticated literary elements scattered in Jeremy: the isolation of the rurality, the cruelty of the living, the loneliness of the boy, all make possible the kind of faith that overwhelms the protagonist and renders itself not only explicable but indeed satisfying.

Furthermore, Jeremy is a profoundly beautiful piece of cinema. Faye has brought something visually enchanting and compelling onto the screen; his efforts here are nothing less than stellar. Jeremy’s emotional anguish and turmoil are visually stylized and indeed accentuated through desaturated yet breathtaking color cinematography. Ian Coad’s camera stunningly evokes the serene stillness and the sprawling and exhilarating beauty of America’s western landscapes; his sensitive vision becomes a photographic grandeur that almost reduces the film’s already simple storyline to a universe of simplicity of scenery and emotion, which overpower the story. Hence, Jeremy quietly delivers an unforgiving reality with glooms, and ultimately, gleams.

Nonetheless, Jeremy produces a magnificent ambience through its sound effect. The exquisite score subtly underplays the frames of actions occurring on the screen, never invasive but always contextually illuminating. Since the film’s narrative corpus is of conflict and convergence, agony and resolution, the story is perfectly set against a reflective score; the score breezes in and out of the film, creating a gentle, calming mood over the scenes it accompanies. Sung solely by a piano, the music in this film, although used minimally and sparingly, works advantageously.

All in all, Jeremy is a particularly finely made short film by a student-filmmaker. Through the power of its minimalist story, the intensity of its sentimentalism, and the deeply touching interpretations of the characters by the actors involved, it is of deep awareness to every important details and every profound themes. Despite its manifest simplicity and obvious brevity, Jeremy is a work of depth and clarity, a work of art, and therefore an essential viewing.

Postscript: Jeremy won “Best Acting” (Dalton O’Dell, who played Jeremy) last week at the Bend Film Festival in Oregon (http://www.bendfilm.org/2010-films/2010-winners/). In September, the film competed with nearly 500 films and won the Angelus Student Film Festival “Triumph of the Spirit Award” in Hollywood (http://angelus.org/winners-current.html). At present, the film is screening at the Heartland Film Festival in Indiana (http://www.trulymovingpictures.org/festival-years/2010/movie/jeremy).

three days: three gone.

Sally JoAnne Menke (December 17, 1953 – September 27, 2010), American film editor who edited all of Quentin Tarantino's films, from Reservoir Dogs (1992) to Ingourious Basterds (2009)

Arthur Hiller Penn (September 27, 1922 – September 28, 2010), American film director and producer who directed Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Tony Curtis (June 3, 1925 – September 29, 2010), American film actor who played a variety of roles, including Joe in Some Like It Hot (1959).

R.I.P.

LTH: A Review

Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s debut film Last Train Home is a feature documentary heroically depicting an unfathomable immensity by intimately focusing on the story of a single family caught in the largest mass migration on earth. Opening overhead shots show a huge mob waiting in the Guangzhou Train Station to push their way into their annual New Year’s journey home – a cultural spectacle made by 130 million some migrant urban workers in modern China. Fan then picks up on the struggle waged by the Zhangs, a married couple working together in a Guangzhou garment factory as sewing-machine operators, to reunite with their teenage children in a Sichuan village 1,300 miles away. Within no time, the film artistically establishes its motif of one migrant worker’s family’s struggle viewed as microcosm for the macrocosm of a rapidly modernizing China, a country marching towards accelerated economic development and global economic dominance at the expense of losing many of its traditional ways and values. Tense or intense, credible or incredible, Fan’s superbly realized docudrama reaches the audience with an unflinching eye for the seeable and a compassionate heart for unseeable.

The film opens in the winter of 2006 in Guangzhou – the sprawling capital of Guangdong, the southernmost province in China, where we meet Changhua Zhang and wife, Suqin Chen. With New Year’s looming, they are desperately seeking train tickets to their home in a small village in Sichuan, the most populous province in China, a place they left their two children 16 years ago. The Zhangs’ daughter Qin has halfway passed her rebellious teenage-hood, and their son Yang enjoys school more than his sister does. If the Zhangs’ ticket searching goes successful, it will be the family’s first reunion in 12 months. Although the Zhangs have rationalized their prolonged absence and the resultant estrangement from their children, especially Qin, the price to be paid to ensure that Qin and Yang stay in school, and thus can have at least the prospect of a better future, does not come to Qin’s understanding. Qin does not appreciate her parents’ sacrifice, and thereof ditches school, leaving her brother and grandmother in Sichuan, and too going south to find a job in another garment factory in the same city. As the Zhangs try to mend a family torn apart by Qin’s decision while pressuring her to return to Sichuan and resume her schooling before her eighteenth birthday, they invite her to accompany them home for the New Year. To get there, however, they must first pass the portals of the Guangzhou Train Station with an ocean of people – indeed their coworkers in South China. It is from here Fan’s film hits its visual peak by ceasing such a sensational yet claustrophobic urban setting, often with exasperation, and always with exhaustion. When the depleted family finally does reach their village home, the respite is not restful and respectful, as an argument between father and daughter devolves into violence, at certainly the film’s emotional zenith. The film ends openly on the mother’s determined mission home to take care of the son and the grandmother, and to seek righteousness or forgiveness and to give new hope a faultless chance.

Last Train Home begins with large numbers – the 130 some million Chinese migrant workers who return home for the New Year’s holiday annually in the world’s largest human migration, and the 2,100 kilometers that separate the Zhang family during the rest of the year, yet once it has hit the audience with those, it narrows the focus considerably and deliberately as to how such a subsistent pattern in modern China affects one otherwise invisible family that proves a perfect, sometimes disturbing sample of the population at large. Last Train Home structures its narrative around a key section in the Chinese calendar – New Year, which is not only a symbol but also an important reminder of the last stronghold of Chinese traditions that have been withering rapidly with the invasion of Western culture. In the words of one poor traveller, “If the family can’t even celebrate New Year’s together, life would be pointless.” This annual trip is both of necessity and of liberty in its motivation, and both existential and spiritual in its devotion.

Last Train Home edges every layer of human emotion with vivid desperation and helplessness. In the film Titanic, as the aged Rose remembers the majestic sinking of Titanic while looking at its computer-generated animation, she says “Thank you for that forensic analysis, but, of course, the experience of it was…quite different.” However arduous Fan’s documentary may have been to shoot, it is always infinitely more arduous to live, both for filmmakers and for film’s subjects. Like migrant workers elsewhere, and probably everywhere, the Zhangs are being exploited and deprived; for 16 years, the couple has sent money home to support the two children being raised only by a peasant grandmother. Their same-time-next-year relation with their children is not of their choice, and is thus doomed to a boil precisely in time to be documented by Fan. Fan’s lens always knows time. It sees the haunting beauty of the nation’s rural side while also sensing the remarkable achievements – railways, tunnels, factories, and all kinds of upgrading – bought by sweats, tears, lost love, missing hope, and extremely cheap wages. The film is in the end about modern China, about the label “Made in China”, about rapid globalization, about the increased rural-urban conflict, about the sociocultural transformation and geopolitical development in developing countries within the current global economic environment, and surely about the impacts those changes have made to each and every individual of those countries.

What Fan does excellently is to manage to insinuate himself into the Zhangs’ lives to a rather remarkable extent, and to present everything in smallest details and sharpest nuances. This is exactly the kind of ethnographic participant observation an anthropologist may bring in the field. The abovementioned moment of confrontation: the violence continues when reunited father and daughter wind up brawling in grandma’s kitchen. “You want to film the real me – this is the real me!” Qin shouts as the camera continues to document the humiliated family. It seems, at least as edited, that it has been intimate for Qin to trust Fan and his crew that much. A brief but essential sequence near the end of the film reveals a few young, absorbed nightclub workers watching the televised Olympic opening ceremonies, and all of them burst into tears. Fan rarely evokes direct or deliberate commentary, yet here he touches the very bottom of the abyss of second generation migrant workers’ emptiness and blindness of their comfort zone and status quo. Moreover, there are numerous instances where the translation of Sichuanese into English triumphs estimably: at most, the flawed translation is required to comprehend the storyline; at least, the well-tempered translation serves to make sense to many idioms and slangs not readily translatable. Fan himself is also the editor and cinematographer of this film. Fan strings many shots of the urban chaos of Guangzhou and the rural tranquility of China’s southwest landscape, of rushing mass and crying individuals, of ageing parents’ anguish and despair, and of adolescent daughter’s rebelliousness and stubbornness together to tell a story that is both universal – children misunderstand parents’ sacrifices and parents forget what it is like to be a teenager – and rather particular to a changing China. Furthermore, the soundtrack of the film is outstanding. To augment the melancholy and the emotional bleakness, a prepared piano has been made to sing the unspeakable and unseeable. The score, while minimal in form and minimalist in style, is indeed contextually maximizing in effect. The occasionally added pop and dance music appropriately enhances the authentic flavor of each scene or sequence.

Last Train Home is an uncompromising portrayal of the Chinese migrant workers’ tired eyes, fried bodies, and frayed tempers at the train station before the New Year, as well as an honoring celebration of the resilience, determination, and optimism of China’s people. Already an award-winner at several documentary festivals, Last Train Home stands as an impressive feature debut from now a harbinger of greater documentary cinema – Lixin Fan. Fan, who has made seven trips to China and spent three years working on Last Train Home, has, in making this grand and often astonishing film, calculated the human cost of the miraculous economic growth in China by mapping a single family dysfunction, or indeed, tragedy presumably multipliable by millions. In sheer cinematic élan, Last Train Home follows the Zhangs’ hope for one New Year to finally reconcile with his family, yet their love and sacrifice of 16 years have fulfilled nothing but pure misery and agony, disinterestedly induced by China’s new social reality. The Zhangs’ story tells the sort of change that China is going through at the juncture between traditions and breaks with tradition.

The On-Campus Screening of LAST TRAIN HOME

Time: 4:00 – 6:00 PM, Wednesday, September 15

Location: Titan Theater (TSU-119)

Event: The Screening of Last Train Home

Thanks to the tremendous efforts by people on and off campus, the funding for our first on-campus event has fully secured, and this event has finally come to fruition! We at the VAC hereby express our heartfelt gratitude to all those helping, supporting, and influencing us from the beginning and throughout the process! Particularly, we are truly grateful to the faith and dedication of, as well as the effective support and kind contribution from, the following individuals and their organizations:

The Anthropology Students Association
The Lambda Alpha National Honor Society, ETA Chapter
Dr. John Bock, Center for Sustainability, Department of Anthropology
Dr. Barbra Erickson, Department of Anthropology
Mr. Lixin Fan, EyeSteelFilm

Dr. Tricia Gabany-Guerrero, Department of Anthropology

Mr. David McKenzie, School of Humanituies & Social Sciences

Ms. Nadja Tennstedt, Zeigeist Films

Ms. Xiaowei Wu, Beijing TV Station

Mr. Wesley Zhou, EZmatchup.com

Last Train Home

The Chinese New Year (or the Spring Festival) is the most important holiday in Chinese Lunar Calendar. It remains the last stronghold of Chinese traditions that have been withering rapidly with the invasion of Western culture. Each year, millions of migrant workers return to their homes from coastal cities to inland rural towns and villages, plunging the local transportation system into utter chaos. For most of these migrants, the cheapest and easiest route home is by train, and they are determined to return home at any cost for the only purpose of an extended, once-a-year family reunion. It is the world’s largest regular human migration and a manmade spectacle that reveals much about modern China, a country marching towards accelerated economic development and global economic dominance at the expense of losing many of her traditional ways.

Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s debut film Last Train Home is a feature documentary depicting the story of one migrant worker’s family, caught in the midst of this home-going rush-hour, through an intimately probing lens. The Zhangs left their rural village and their then-young children to seek employment in Guangzhou 16 years ago, in hope of earning enough to pay for their children’s schooling. To have the children educated is the only way to secure them a better future. Now their 17-year-old daughter Qin, a rebellious teenager who has always felt neglected and lost because of her parents’ yearlong absence, is convinced that her parents care more about making money than about taking care of her. Thus, she dropped out of school, and too came south to Guangzhou and became a young migrant worker herself, hence having failed to live up to her parents’ expectations. Living in the same city but not talking to each other, the family is shattered by years of frustration and confusion.

In sheer cinematic élan, Last Train Home follows the Zhangs’ hope for this New Year to finally reunite his family, and to get the daughter back to school. The Zhangs’ love and sacrifice of 16 solid years have not triumphed at anything, but instead have been cruelly challenged by China’s new social reality. Will the Zhangs succeed this time? The Zhangs’ story tells the sort of change that China is going through at the juncture between traditions and breaks with tradition.

http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/lasttrainhome/