Movie Review: Last Train Home

Poster for 'Last Train Home', a film by Lixin Fan. Photo / Supplied

The largest human migration in the world is not of refugees fleeing war but of Chinese heading home for the holidays: some 130 million workers - if it was a country it would be the world's 10th biggest - who keep the wheels of China's economic miracle turning, try (and often fail) to get on trains for 30-hour journeys to spend the lunar new year with their families.

Fan, a Canadian-Chinese film-maker distills this into a minute study of one family. His film, shot over several years, follows Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, Sichuan peasants whowork in the piecework sewing sweatshops of Guangzhou; more than 2000km away, their two children, Qin and Yang, are raised by their grandmother, whose anxiety that they study hard to escape their parents' fate is palpable.

Fan's images of the village are hauntingly beautiful but he also makes it plain that it is a dead-end life of mosquito-plagued drudgery. And in eye-popping sequences in crowded railway stations, the film captures the social dislocation that besets a nation caught between an agrarian, communist past and an industrialised, urban present. You don't become globalisation's cheapest workforce without paying a social price.

Sensibly, Fan does not use his subjects simply as generic exemplars. In intimate touches both small (a goodnight phone call), and large (a vicious fight between father and daughter in which Qin screams at the camera, "Is this what you wanted to film?"), we see the family as the individuals they are.

Like Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze, which came from the same producers, this is one of many Chinese films that are closely examining the country in transition. And it's a standout - exemplary documentary-making, distinguished by unflinching candour and profound empathy.

Stars: 4/5
Director: Lixin Fan
Running time: 87 mins
Rating: M (offensive language) In Mandarin and Sichuan dialect with English subtitles
Verdict: Exemplary documentary

-TimeOut