FeatureFilm
Last Train Home
- Rated: M - offensive language
- Running Length:87 minutes
- Cast:Changhua Zhan, Yang Zhang, Suqin Chen
Session Times
Summary
As China becomes a wealthier country, it is inevitable that conflict will arise between the Chinese citizens who produce consumer goods for the world, and those who wish to consume them. This stunning documentary, in the vein of Up The Yangtze, watches one family over three years as they come to terms with this disparity.
Opening on a crowd, some of the millions of Chinese who crowd onto trains for an annual visit to their home villages from the urban centers where they work. Focusing in on Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, we meet our protagonists, a married couple who left their home in Szechuan province to take factory jobs in Guangzhou. Here they work in rows, sewing jeans for many hours a day before retiring to crowded dormitories to sleep.
They save every yuan they can for their children who are being brought up by a grandmother back home. The backbreaking toil and lack of privacy is justified by the hope that after 15 years of this, they will have paid for their kids to finish school and go on to a better life.
But as the film so heartbreakingly shows, the kids are not grateful to their parents for this sacrifice. They barely know them except as voices on a telephone, or figures who visit once a year, bearing gifts. Tired of the insistent nagging of her parents, daughter Zhang Qin quits high school and travels to Guangzhou to take a factory job. If she keeps her wages instead of sending them home, she’ll be able to spend on herself, indulging her desire for jeans manufactured at a different factory to the one she works in.
The film raises many questions, most poignantly, is a generation enough to raise the standard of living in a nation the size of China?