Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival

 

 
Last Train Home
Director: Lixin Fan
Country: Canada
Year: 2009
Runtime: 85 minutes
Genre: Documentary
Screening Times: Wednesday, February 24, 6:30 p.m.
Location: Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles Street West
 
A co-presentation with Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
 
Buy tickets from Cinematheque Ontario
 
Synopsis:
Last Train Home, an emotionally engaging and visually beautiful debut film from Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan, draws us into the fractured lives of a single migrant family caught up in this desperate annual migration. Sixteen years ago, the Zhangs abandoned their young children to find work in the city, consoled by the hope that their wages would lift their children into a better life. But in a bitter irony, the Zhangs’ hopes for the future are undone by their very absence. Qin, the child they left behind, has grown into adolescence crippled by a sense of abandonment. In an act of teenage rebellion, she drops out of school. She too will become a migrant worker. The decision is a heartbreaking blow for the parents. In classic cinema verité style, Last Train Home follows the Zhangs’ attempts to change their daughter’s course and repair their ruptured family. Intimate and candid, the film paints a human portrait of the dramatic changes sweeping China. We identify with the Zhangs as they navigate through the stark and difficult choices of a society caught between old ways and new realities. Can they get ahead and still undo some of the damage that has been done to their family?
 
Director’s Biography:
Lixin Fan worked as a producer/journalist at China’s state broadcaster CCTV before he became a filmmaker and moved to Montreal, Canada. Born and raised in the period of China’s integration into the world, Lixin has engaged himself in social political filmmaking to document and interpret the vast changes took place in a time of changes. Lixin recently finished his debut feature documentary Last Train Home, which deals with the world’s largest human migration in the ear of globalization. Lixin worked as associate producer on the acclaimed feature documentary Up the Yangtze, a film about the world’s largest hydroelectric project, the Three Gorges Dam. The film was a best Canadian documentary film at TIFF in 2007, a finalist at IDFA and Sundance 2007. In 2003, Lixin edited the Peabody and Grierson award-wining documentary To Live Is Better Than To Die. The film, recognized as one of the most shocking documentary on the topic, reveals China’s AIDS epidemic and was featured in Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on BBC, CBC and PBS.
 
Awards:
RIDM, Winner of the Cinémathèque Québécoise award for best film from Quebec/Canada (Montreal, Canada, November 2009)
IDFA, Winner of the VPRO IDFA award for Best Feature-Length Documentary (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 2009)
 
Film Festivals:
Sundance Film Festival, Park City, USA, January 2010
Whistler Film Festival, Whistler, Canada, December 2009
Guangzhou Intl Documentary Film Festival, Guangzhou, China, December 2009
Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Toronto, Canada, February 2010
 
Media Coverage:
CBC News: Montreal filmmaker nabs doc prize
Globe and Mail, The: Canadian documentary wins international prize
IndieWire: Must see IDFA doc: “Last Train Home”
Playback: Last Train steams ahead
Realscreen: “Last Train Home” catches top prize at IDFA
Toronto Star: “Last Train Home” to show at Sundance Film Festival
Vancouver Sun: Quebec film wins top honours at Whistler Film Festival
 
Overview by Julie Giles