Last Train Home

This is an excellent documentary that shows the drab and difficult life of a blue collar Chinese family. The mother and father work in sweatshops making clothes, hundreds of miles away from their home village. They get to come home once a year, for the New Year holiday. The kids are growing up with their grandmother, and becoming increasingly alienated from their parents, who mean well. It is poignant and as real as can be.

Lixin Fan's film retains an extraordinary relationship with it's direct subjects; a struggling family, and the tensions of some 130 million other peasants toiling in similar fashion, trying to make a living in the enormous industrial complex that is modern China. Juxtaposing the intimate, enchanting portrait of the Zhang family with the action footage of them lost in the utterly insane annual event that constitutes 'goin home for the holidays in China was a masterstroke. This, thankfully, is one of those documentary films that never feels like it intrudes, so much so that a sense of voyeurism crept up on me. I found the cinematography so fluid and captivating that the solitary occasion wherein the tension of a cameras glaring presence is brought to bare became an unforgettable scene of wrought emotion. I actually had to press pause. This film is a real achievement in CinÃma vÃritÃ, from a special artist, and an important one too.