NY Times: Following Workers' Trails of Tears in China

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/movies/29home.html?_r=2&ref=movies

IN the quietly devastating documentary “Last Train Home” Chinese migrant workers huddle together in an overcrowded railway car, sweating through their annual ride home for the New Year holiday. One nattily coiffed young man inveighs against the West, complaining bitterly that American consumers who buy the cheap Chinese goods he makes also get to spend most of their higher salaries on discretionary items, while he, who makes those goods, must send most of his earnings home to support his family.

Lixin Fan, who shot, edited and directed the film, might have chosen to stick with this feisty representative of the new China. Instead his camera cuts away to a middle-aged couple who sit in silence. Zhang Changhua and Cheng Suqin, who make this trip every year to visit the children they left behind nearly two decades ago, belong to a mostly ignored generation of roughly 130 million migrant workers who have sacrificed their productive years, and possibly the integrity of their families, in service to China’s headlong rush into global economic supremacy.

“Many times I was in tears at all this misery,” Mr. Fan said, seated in an anteroom at the Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film Festival, where “Last Train Home” played in May after winning praise at the Sundance Film Festival. “If you were on this train with hundreds of migrants around us — it stinks, it’s dirty and everyone’s trying to survive, just to see their kids.”

In 2006 Mr. Fan and a skeleton crew of three began documenting the effects of industrial change on this family, with whom he spent three years, on and off.

Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng left their village in Sichuan — Mr. Fan’s home province and the country’s largest exporter of labor — to work in Guangzhou, the world’s largest manufacturing source of denim jeans. The film cuts between the factory where they toil seven days a week, and the bucolic but chronically poor countryside where they visit their little boy and teenage daughter, who are raised by a careworn yet uncomplaining grandmother who suffered even worse privation under Mao Zedong.

Mr. Fan, a slender 33-year-old who cheerfully attributes his fluent English to “fighting with my Chinese-American girlfriend,” showed a sociologist’s grasp of the broad shifts that have afflicted workers like this couple. The lack of farm subsidies and expropriation of farmland for urban construction have crippled agriculture, while an outdated housing registration system that denies education and social services to rural migrants in the city has created a sharp class divide and placed untenable strains on the traditionally close-knit Chinese family.

The film’s unnerving railway station scenes — panoramic views of frustrated crowds surging forward, barely contained by nervous police officers with truncheons — underscore these changes and the growing specter of civil war. “The government does not have a perfect track record of dealing with dissent,” Mr. Fan said carefully. “So civil war would be a terrible thing. While I was making this film, it was difficult to figure out where to point the finger. At the government? The factory owners and corporations? The West? I’m not in a righteous place to answer, but I hope to raise this question for my audience.”

Mr. Fan encountered little serious official opposition, perhaps because of his accommodating demeanor, or because national issues are kept mostly in the background of this intimate film, which opens Friday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village.

To gain the family’s trust Mr. Fan and his crew ate with them in their dormitory in Guangzhou, taught them how to manage their own wireless mikes, which they wore constantly, and would sleep on the pile of warm jeans the couple made while the crew waited to tag along after they finished their shift at midnight. “So 15 minutes into the film, after that first train ride,” he said proudly, “we’d already known each other for a year.”

“The mom once told me that they worked for 29 days, 15 hours a day straight,” Mr. Fan said. “The dormitories are right across the street from their factory, so it takes one minute exactly to go from their sewing machine to their bed. So that’s what they did for that month — sewing machine, bed, sewing machine, bed.”

At home Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng encountered their deeply resentful daughter, Qin, 17, who rebels against her parents’ pressure to get the grades they see as her passport to a better life. At one point the simmering tensions come to a boil, forcing Mr. Fan to decide on his feet whether to intervene. “The kids want more attention, and the parents are never around,” he said. “The parents know that education is the only way to, as we call it, jump out of the dragon’s door, out of poverty. But Qin, who is rebellious, independent and smart, did it her own way.”

Still, Mr. Fan doesn’t believe that the Chinese family is close to collapse. “Down deep we are still very family oriented,” he said. “When Qin gets a little older, she will come to understand that.”

He added, laughing, “I still call my mom every other day.”

If Mr. Fan belongs to a new generation of Internet-savvy filmmakers schooled in Western liberal ideas, his spiritual, intellectual and cinematic influences reflect both ancient tradition and modernity. His father was a college professor and projectionist, and Mr. Fan grew up watching foreign films. Like many of his generation, he broke with tradition by leaving home for Beijing, then gave up a prestigious job (“My mom thought I was crazy”) with the CCTV network, briefly relocating to Canada before working as a sound man and associate producer on the well-received 2007 documentary “Up the Yangtze,” about the mass displacements caused by the building of the Three Gorges Dam.

“Lixin is not from the foreign-influenced cultural centers,” said Daniel Cross, president of EyesteelFilm company in Montreal, which produced “Up the Yangtze” and co-produced “Last Train Home” with the ITVS television and cable company, which holds the North American television rights. “He comes from the sticks, and that’s what makes him unique.”

Mr. Fan said he is a committed Taoist, and his eye for the interplay of beauty and ugliness is influenced by what he calls the “epic poetry” of the director Jia Zhangke, whose 2004 feature “The World” centered on the youthful staff of a giant theme park that replicates the world’s famous tourist spots.

“I see a lot of Chinese philosophy in Jia’s film,” said Mr. Fan, who added that he hopes to seed his next project, a documentary about China’s green initiative focusing on a state-financed wind farm on the Silk Road in the Gobi Desert, with his earnings from “Last Train Home.”

“I’ll shoot there and in a remote mountain school where Taoist philosophy originated, where they recruit peasant children to teach them Tai Chi with martial art,” he said. “It’s yin and yang, keeping the balance between human desire and what nature can give you