LAST TRAIN HOME
A family embarks on an annual tormenting journey along with 200 other million peasant workers to reunite with their distant family, and to revive their love and dignity as China soars as the world's next super power.
 

Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos as 130 million migrant workers journey to their home villages for the New Year’s holiday. This mass exodus is the world’s largest human migration—an epic spectacle that reveals a country tragically caught between its rural past and industrial future.

Working over several years in classic verité style Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan (with the producers of the award-winning hit documentary Up the Yangtze) travels with one couple who have embarked on this annual trek for almost two decades. Like so many of China’s rural poor, Changhua and Sugin Zhang left behind their two infant children for grueling factory jobs. Their daughter Qin—now a restless and rebellious teenager—both bitterly resents their absence and longs for her own freedom away from school, much to the utter devastation of her parents. Emotionally engaging and starkly beautiful, Last Train Home’s intimate observation of one fractured family sheds light on the human cost of China’s ascendance as an economic superpower.

CANADA/CHINA/UK — 2009 — DOC — 85mins
 
Showtimes:
Saturday, Jan 15, 3pm
Monday, Jan 17, 4pm

Thursday, Jan 20, 7pm

JUST ANNOUNCED: Ellen David Friedman will give a brief talk on the issues of Chinese migrant labor exemplified in the film "The Last Train Home" after the Thursday, Jan. 20 screening.

Ellen David Friendman has been a union organizer and labor educator in Vermont since the mid-70’s. From 1986-2006 she was Director of Organizing and Training for the Vermont affiliate of the National Education Association. Starting in 2003 she began working in China, and – since 2005-- spends one academic term per year teaching labor studies at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and working closely with the Guangzhou Federation of Trade Unions, grass-roots labor NGOs, students and scholars. She also organizes exchange study tours between U.S. and Chinese labor leaders and academics..

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