Thousands of migrant Chinese workers crowding a train station in the midst of a holiday pilgrimage, racing from factory cities to return to more peaceful rural homes. These astonishing images frame Last Train Home with a sense of surreal urgency.
From a scale of anonymous thousands, director Lixin Fan focuses exclusively on one family, personalizing the costs of China’s painful transition to become an industrialized nation.
The victims are many, but as the central character in this powerful documentary, young Qin Zhang clearly embodies the fallout of a generation of separated families.
She has grown up without parents present in her daily life. Seeing them only on holidays, family traditions show the strain of separation and the poverty Qin’s parents want to escape. While they work for low wages in the city, she has grown up in her ancestral village.
Despite her parents’ sacrifices to work and provide her an education, Qin feels her parents have only cared about making money. This young girl, years from adulthood, sees no alternative but to follow a path to become yet another migrant worker, working in abusive conditions for little pay.
From the producers of Up the Yangtze, Last Train Home is another insightful but unobtrusive observation of the damages caused by China’s frantic race towards industrialization.
Program Notes by Alex Rogalski
