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/