The 91-minute 2009 documentary, Last Train Home plays Reel North Film Festival's monthly documentary night March 2 in the Basement Bijou of the Thompson Public Library. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Showtime is 7 p.m. and admission is $5.
Every year, during the lunar New Year, 130 million workers return from China's industrial cities to their rural homes in what Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan calls the largest human migration in the world. The film is in Mandarin, and Sichuan dialect, with English subtitles.
The is a story of fractured lives and a desperate annual migration.
To explore what those almost incomprehensible numbers mean in human terms, Fan's camera looks at a throng of migrants pressing toward the train station in the southern city of Guangzhou.
Fan focuses on a couple, Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin and their daughter, Zhang Qin, to illustrate the social phenomenon.
The couple came from a rural village in China's Sichuan province and have worked in the factories of Guangzhou for 15 years, stitching and bundling garments, sharing quarters in a dormitory and returning home each year to visit their children.
Their daughter is a high school student when the documentary opens and her younger brother is in middle school. The children live with their grandmother, who settled in the area when the Chinese government was sending workers from cities to farms, and who is part of a the never-ending cycle of sacrifice and suffering driven both by changes in state policy and shifts in the global economy.
Chen Suqin and her husband want a better life for their children, but their way of expressing this desire sounds, to Qin in particular, like harping and criticism. She is pestered to improve her grades, but has trouble accepting the authority of a mother she sees only for a few days a year.
The story unfolds slowly over three years.
You can view a 2:38 trailer for Last Train Home at: http://www.eyesteelfilm.com/lasttrainhome
Reel North Film Festival, now in its eighth year, under the direction of Lisa Evasiuk - and in partnership with administrator Cheryl Davies of the Thompson Public Library - has over the last several years, gradually expanded from a three-day film extravaganza of indie and alternative films, traditionally shown the first weekend in November, to adding Saturday night double-feature movies from fall through spring, and as of Nov. 24, 2009, monthly weeknight documentaries, which debuted in front of a full house with Food, Inc., a 94-minute documentary about the U.S. food industry, which was nominated in the category of distinguished documentary achievement for an International Documentary Association award in 2009.
In January, to a packed house, Reel North showed the 58-minute documentary "And This Is My Garden" from Wabowden's Mel Johnson School Gardening Project by Winnipeg filmmaker Katharina Stieffenhofer of Growing Local Productions in association with Buffalo Gal Pictures of Winnipeg.
Phyllis Lang, Liz Jarvis, and Jean du Toit's Buffalo Gal Pictures merged with Tina Keeper's Keeper Productions to form Kistikan Pictures last November. Kistikan is Cree for "garden." Keeper was the Liberal Member of Parliament for Churchill riding from 2006 through 2008, and is a member of the Norway House Cree Nation.
On Feb. 2, Evasiuk selected the 101-minute documentary, The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, released in May 2009, for the monthly documentary night. While the songwriting duo of Richard and Robert Sherman were never exactly household names, devoted Walt Disney fans of such classic 1960s and 1970s movies as Parent Trap, Mary Poppins, The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Charlotte's Web, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and The Jungle Book, among more than 50 films, know their music.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. March 2 for Last Train Home. Showtime is 7 p.m. and admission is $5. Old Dutch barbecue potato chips, water, coffee and Oreo cookies are usually available.
