Photo Gallery
As with everything else, those cheap goods which so much of the world now takes for granted come with a price beyond that listed on the tag. In Lixin Fan's stunning, hypnotic documentary that price is laid out for all to see in the form of one family permanently ruptured by the inexorable metrics of economy and industry.
Changhua and Sugin Zhang left their Sichaun village years before to work in one of the Guangzhou factories that have powered the Chinese economic dynamo. The couple left behind not only their home, but their children, a young boy and teenage girl raised by their grandmother, a wiry dynamo who hoists heaping baskets of farm produce onto her back as though they were nothing. The Zhangs only ever see their children over Chinese New Year, the tumultuous holiday that produces not just the film's most wrenching drama but also its most indelible images.
On-screen titles inform that each Chinese New Year, 130 million migrant workers head home. The largest such migration in the world, it's as though the entire populations of France and the United Kingdom headed for the local train or bus station at the same time. Lixin's camera pans slowly across a sea of heads jostling with painful slowness toward the train terminal, a sight made more poignant by the knowledge that the Zhangs are likely down there in the scrum.
Lixin was on the team that made the impeccable Up the Yangtze and his work mimics that film's marriage of piercing, intimate drama with unforgettable imagery. The Zhangs seem at first the definition of humble. Possessed of a rural quietude, they appear to be the kind of steadfast, no-complaint workers (heads down, get on with it) that their rock-bottom manufacturers require.
But that seeming docility is tossed to the side in scenes that highlight the weary agony of their daily existence. In one, they have to battle their way through a train terminal crowd of Biblical proportions, only to be stuck waiting there for an incredible five days. Another shows the parents confronting their daughter Qin (a willful adolescent who resentfully claims not to have "any feelings" for her distant parents, whom she only ever sees at the New Year), who forsakes their desires that she stay on the farm and get an education in order to become a migrant worker just like them. Slaps are thrown and tears shed as the Zhangs witness the seeming crumbling of even their most modest hopes.
Amidst all this, Lixin threads incredible, emotive shots of the long, grey misty valleys, veined with rivers and rail lines, that the Zhangs must travel through on their 2100-kilometer journey of train, bus, and boat. Set against the ache and turmoil of the family's schizoid existence - their cramped city dwelling (more concrete cubicle than apartment) contrasted with the sweeping fields and beautiful vistas of the ancestral farm - Lixin's film has all the sting and punch of a classic 19th century novel of industrial-boom America. Perhaps a century from now, when the cheap-labor factories have moved on, Lixin's work will be studied in China just as Theodore Dreiser is read by American students today, with knitted-brow wonderment at what ordinary people undertook just to make a living.
Changhua and Sugin Zhang left their Sichaun village years before to work in one of the Guangzhou factories that have powered the Chinese economic dynamo. The couple left behind not only their home, but their children, a young boy and teenage girl raised by their grandmother, a wiry dynamo who hoists heaping baskets of farm produce onto her back as though they were nothing. The Zhangs only ever see their children over Chinese New Year, the tumultuous holiday that produces not just the film's most wrenching drama but also its most indelible images.
On-screen titles inform that each Chinese New Year, 130 million migrant workers head home. The largest such migration in the world, it's as though the entire populations of France and the United Kingdom headed for the local train or bus station at the same time. Lixin's camera pans slowly across a sea of heads jostling with painful slowness toward the train terminal, a sight made more poignant by the knowledge that the Zhangs are likely down there in the scrum.
Lixin was on the team that made the impeccable Up the Yangtze and his work mimics that film's marriage of piercing, intimate drama with unforgettable imagery. The Zhangs seem at first the definition of humble. Possessed of a rural quietude, they appear to be the kind of steadfast, no-complaint workers (heads down, get on with it) that their rock-bottom manufacturers require.
But that seeming docility is tossed to the side in scenes that highlight the weary agony of their daily existence. In one, they have to battle their way through a train terminal crowd of Biblical proportions, only to be stuck waiting there for an incredible five days. Another shows the parents confronting their daughter Qin (a willful adolescent who resentfully claims not to have "any feelings" for her distant parents, whom she only ever sees at the New Year), who forsakes their desires that she stay on the farm and get an education in order to become a migrant worker just like them. Slaps are thrown and tears shed as the Zhangs witness the seeming crumbling of even their most modest hopes.
Amidst all this, Lixin threads incredible, emotive shots of the long, grey misty valleys, veined with rivers and rail lines, that the Zhangs must travel through on their 2100-kilometer journey of train, bus, and boat. Set against the ache and turmoil of the family's schizoid existence - their cramped city dwelling (more concrete cubicle than apartment) contrasted with the sweeping fields and beautiful vistas of the ancestral farm - Lixin's film has all the sting and punch of a classic 19th century novel of industrial-boom America. Perhaps a century from now, when the cheap-labor factories have moved on, Lixin's work will be studied in China just as Theodore Dreiser is read by American students today, with knitted-brow wonderment at what ordinary people undertook just to make a living.
