Last Train Home: Globalization in China's backyard
Director Lixin Fan explores the real implications of migrant work for rural families in China
By Jenn Kucharczyk, Staff Writer
Issue date: 3/4/10 Section: Film & Music
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Last Train Home portrays a number of human rights issues within the framework of an intense family drama. The film follows the Zhangs, migrant workers who leave their children with grandparents in Sichuan Province to spend the year working in a Guangzhou denim factory.
The couple has spent the last 16 years as migrant workers, only returning to their family once each year for the Chinese New Year. They have spent less than a year in total with their 16-year-old daughter and younger son, and must join the desperate crowds of 130 million migrant workers at the ticket kiosks and train stations every winter in order to get home and see their families. I ask Fan what inspired him to tackle this storyline. He explains,
"I tried to address social issues that China and its people are facing, and put it into the global context, show how the world economy impacts one family working in a Chinese factory."
Fan strongly emphasizes the role played by globalization in shaping the inadequate state of workers' rights, a reality which in turn contributes to the phenomenon of mass annual rural-urban migration and China's huge disparities in wealth. Before he moved to Canada with his family three years ago, Fan spent ten years working as a cameraman and occasional reporter at CCTV, the Chinese state television channel. This line of work gave him the opportunity to travel to remote areas of the country, where he met many peasants and became inspired to tell their stories.
"When I came back to the cosmopolitan life in Beijing, the urban contrast really struck me," Fan explains. "It's a huge gap between the two... I wanted to study why it is like this thirty years after [the economic reforms]."
Fan made Last Train Home without a specific target audience in mind, feeling that the story's multiple facets would enable everyone to take something different from the film. The film appeals to the Chinese peasants, who wanted their second-class treatment to be revealed. Fan also hopes that the film will establish greater understanding among the urban Chinese population regarding the rural migrants' plight. Ideally, Last Train Home may even inspire Chinese citizens to act locally for change.
China's rural-urban binary is reinforced by the lingering legacy of a household registration policy across China that prevents rural citizens from using urban social services in urban settings. Since education is not provided by the state for rural migrant children in cities, this unequal policy is responsible for the separation of rural families. In terms of an international or Western audience, Fan intends to spark the discussion on whether a Western lifestyle is sustainable in terms of the human cost of making cheap products for "a never-ending appetite for consuming."
That said, Fan discusses the dilemma in identifying a figure to blame. The Zhangs experience an overwhelming domestic strain that makes tempers explode, but Fan would not say that any one family member triggered the tense situation the family is facing. Nor is the government entirely to blame, for they are struggling to keep these millions of people employed in order to have social stability. Sadly, this bind often leads to reliance on foreign investment, which in turn pollutes the environment and often deteriorates the conditions and quality of work.
Even as a newcomer to the documentary-making scene, Fan has already established a distinct, self-described "stripped down" film style. Last Train Home is a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking, because it completely replicates the sensation of looking through a two-way mirror. The scenes are extremely intimate but also very natural, with the pauses and repetitiveness of everyday conversation. The camera is clearly a prominent guiding force in the film, replacing any need for voice-over narration while still maintaining incredible depth of meaning. Yet the cinéma vérité style utilized by Fan makes the viewer forget that they're watching a filmed scene at all. Fan joked that many people have been convinced, simply because of its cinematographic style, that Last Train Home was a piece of fiction. Someone once asked Fan how he'd managed to organize the riotous crowd of several thousand people for the train station sequences, as if they believed that these crowds had been composed of extras.
Just shy of an hour and a half in length, the film was cut from 300 hours of footage filmed over a two-year period. Over this lengthy span of time, according to Fan, the Zhangs had become so comfortable around the camera that it didn't intervene with their natural reactions or speech. Yet the family's engagement with each other rather than the camera also built the film's resemblance to fiction, just as some of the dialogue was fortuitously poetic.
"I shouldn't say I was so happy," Fan says of one such incidence, "but I was so lucky to get that intimate scene that night... I couldn't even write a better line."
Fan's next project will document the world's largest wind turbine farm, currently being built in the Gobi Desert. He intends to focus on China's development in low-carbon industry, but his concrete thesis is yet to be formed. We'll just have to catch up with him in a few years.
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