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Tracee Hsiang
Working over several years, director Lixin Fan traveled with one couple who has embarked on these annual treks for almost two decades. Like many of China's rural poor, the Zhangs left their native village of Huilong, Daan Town [zh], Guang'an District in Sichuan province and their newborn daughter to find work in Guangzhou in a garment factory for 16 years and see her only once a year during the Spring Festival. Their daughter Qin, now a restless and rebellious teenager, resents her parents' absence and longs for her own freedom away from school and her rural hometown, much to the dismay of her parents. She eventually leaves school, against the wishes of her parents, to work in the city.
"We always kept contact with the family after we finished filming. The girl, she quit that job at the bar and went to find a new job. She's floating around. I knew she had a job at a hotel as a bartender and she went back to the factory for a small while and she came to study in a vocational school in Beijing last year for a few months, and then she quit again. Now she's working in a small city in Hubei. She's 22 now, so a big girl. She doesn't [get back for Spring Festival]. She still resents her parents very much. She thinks she never received any love from the parents, so she'll deliberately avoid them during Chinese New Year.
The little brother is now 16 years old. He was doing really great in school, he got really good marks. He's second-year in high school [Chinese high schools go three years]. He got a few No. 1s in the past few years. His parents were really happy.
Mother, she lost her job. She [technically] quit, but it's because of the financial crisis, [which] brought down the salaries so much. The factory usually doesn't fire you, it just drops the salary to a level that makes you quit by yourself. So she went back to the village to take care of the son. So now it's the father working alone in Guangzhou in the factory. So I think it's a really sad thing to see: by the end of this documentary, you see this family has been shattered into smaller pieces. Although the daughter did "succeed" in finding her own independence in the city."
Manohla Dargis of the New York Times picked Last Train Home as one of the most outstanding works from the 2010 Sundance by characterizing it as "a beautifully shot, haunting and haunted large scale portrait".[7]
Film critic Roger Ebert praised its depiction of conflict in one family as they struggle to improve their quality of life; giving the film four out of four. He concluded that due to the film's depiction of the effects of capitalism on the country that "[t]he rulers of China may someday regret that they distributed the works of Marx so generously".[8]
Praising Last Train Home as "a documentary masterpiece", Brian Brooks of IndieWIRE wrote that "filmmaker Lixin Fan may very well be one of modern-day China's great non-fiction storytellers."[9]
Last Train Home was one of the top five films nominated for the Directors Guild of America Documentary Prize, announced on January 29, 2011 at the 63rd annual DGA Awards Dinner.[11] It lost to Charles Ferguson's "Inside Job."
Fan Lixin's Last Train Home is an amazing documentary achievement. Fan takes us inside the lives of a single rural Sichuan family. The parents left Sichuan 16 years before to seek work that would improve their family's living standards and increase the options available for their children. The grandparents were left to care for the family's daughter, and later, a son. Grandpa has passed away, so now grandma is doing most of the childrearing. The distance hasn't been easy on the parents or the children. The stunning scenes from the annual migration workers make back to their home villages dominate the film's trailer and posters, but viewers will surely remember the less crowded but no less tense scenes in the family's Sichuan home.
Click here to visit the film's website (the dvd became available 2/22/2011).
We were privileged to have Fan Lixin screen the film for an overflow audience in December 2010. Click here to read our preview of the film in Talking Points.
edited by Clay Dube on 2/27/2011
Kenneth Turan reviewed Last Train Home for the Los Angeles Times in September 2010. The review begins,
"Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping may or may not have actually said "to get rich is glorious," but his country acted as if he did, pushing China to the first rank of global financial players. The Chinese economic miracle, however, came at a wrenching human cost, one that is beautifully explored in an exceptional documentary called "Last Train Home."
"Directed by Chinese-born Lixin Fan, "Last Train" takes its name and its overall framework from Chinese migrant workers who toil for most of the year at factories far from their home villages. They return, often by train, to see their children and parents only for the Chinese New Year."
Click here to read the full review.
Clay showed a clip of this film at the Chinese Economy seminar a few weeks ago, and although I had to leave before seeing the end, I could tell that it would work perfectly for my Human Geography class. I showed it last week as the wrap-up for a unit on development, and my students loved it. Although it is a documentary, it plays very much like a feature film, with a strong story line and beautiful shots of the Chinese countryside. For my purposes, it illustrated a number of concepts I've taught this year: periodic movement (going home to celebrate the new year), global popular culture (Qin's haircut), core-periphery relationships (Chinese workers creating goods for export), diffusion of religion (Buddhist rituals). The trip home, with its movement from the industrial city to the agricultural village and its myriad forms of transportation, neatly encapsulated the history of development in reverse. Given all the talk of China's economic rise, it was a useful corrective for my students to see the conditions under which the family lives and works. The film also made it easier for them to see why geographers consider China part of the "semi-periphery." We also had an impassioned discussion about the daughter's decision to defy her parents (this was a room full of 12th-grade girls) and the ways in which culture shapes familial roles and expectations. Informative, engaging, and moving. Thanks for the recommendation, Clay!
One of my colleagues who attended the first Saturday seminar told me about this film. I ordered it on Netflix and showed it to my four AP Human Geography classes this past week. We are studying urbanization and this video provides the negative aspects of the changing economy and culture of China due to rapid industrialization. It corresponds nicely with the book we read for a summer reading assignment called "Where Am I Wearing" by Kelsey Timmerman. It is a book in which the author travels to trace the factories and people that made his favorite articles of clothing. He traveled to China where his flip flops were made and later visited the workers home villages just like in the film. Each illustrates the breakdown of the family unit as the dark side of globalization.
If anyone is interested in using the book along with the film, I created a series of questions for each that I'd be happy to share.
I watched 'Last Train Home' last night. The cinematography was, at times, quite stunning and very artistic. Though the shots of the crowds from above with all the diferent colored umbrellas was repeated too often..I found it interesting. HOW BLEAK is the life of the chinese migrant worker!! HOW AWFUL! I found it so grim, really..so sad.
Yes -- the life of a migrant worker is hard and mostly dull, though we see Qin enjoy the bright lights of the city. Why do they endure it? Mostly because opportunities back home are too few and because of our amazing human ability to imagine that sacrifice today will yield good things tomorrow.
Other films that I'd encourage you to see: China in the Red (a PBS Frontline documentary: , you can watch it online) and China Blue (screened as part of the PBS Independent Lens series, we were fortunate to have the director here in fall 2009: ).
I learned a lot from watching this movie. I loved the rainy effects which reminded me of some older cultural movies from some time ago. Contrary to many opinions, I found the lifestyles of Chinese migrant workers to be very interesting.
Thank you
This film was painful to watch. I felt the stress of getting on the train and the long hours at work. This movie reminded me of the Mexican migrant workers who come to the United states and work hard to send money home for better living conditions. However the immigrants cannot go home due to their immigration status.
It's a sad movie. I know, i'm a little bit melakolic, but overall i love this movie. The idea behind this movie really amazed me. And the most thing i love from this movie is about its angle on how they captured the environment, really stunning.
When going through the list of movies that I collected throughout our seminar, it was difficult to decide which movie I should review. As I went down my list I noticed a trend. In nearly each class, someone mentioned the Last Train Home to me as a movie that both I and my students would enjoy. While there were parts of the movie that I thought went slow, I have to agree that overall this movie sends a powerful message to its viewers. It gives you a better understanding of the family, work, values, economics and overcrowding in China. What I liked about the movie was that it displayed real issues with real reactions. At first I think that my students will feel as though they can't relate to the film, perhaps they all live at home with both their parents or they don't live in a rural area farming their own food. However, anyone who has worked with teens, knows that they don't like to be told what to do and often times find the need to go against authority. Ultimately, my students will relate to the younger characters in the film.
In the movie Qin left her grandmothers home in the countryside and chose to move to Xitang city where she worked in a factory producing jeans. Qin enjoyed the idea of making her own money, yet as her parents calmly her, she had no value for money and didn't use any of it for the betterment of her family, like her parents did when they moved away for 16 years. Instead she used it to "stimulate" the Chinese government by buying things at the mall, including a new haircut, something that I think a lot of teens would do, regardless of where they live.
Outside of the people being stuck at the train station for days, the scene I found most shocking was when they captured the father reaction to his rebellious daughters language. In front of their family, grandma included, Qin spoke to her father in a disrespectful tone using inappropriate language. I think this scene, if I were to show it to my students, would reinforce the level of respect that parents demand in China and show the difference in discipline in China . Overall, I think that this movie would fall perfectly into my unit on East Asia. I would show this film at the end of the unit, allowing students to get a visual of what modern China looks like including population concerns, holidays, religion, food, work, advancements and family values. This would make for a great end to my unit.