Last Train Home

Every year before Chinese New Year, some hundred and thirty million migrant workers set out from the cities where they work for their home villages. That forty-day movement, called chunyun, is the largest human migration in the world. The documentary follows one family inside that crowd: the Zhangs, working in a factory in Guangdong, and their two children left with a grandmother in a village in Sichuan. Lixin Fan worked with the same family for three years. The central tension is not the crush at the station but what happens at home: the parents left in order to work for their children, and precisely because of that they do not know them. When their daughter decides to leave school for a factory, the argument breaks out in front of the camera and the film does not cut away. The Canadian production won best feature-length documentary at IDFA in 2009 and was selected for the world documentary competition at Sundance in 2010. Who it's for: Anyone interested in the Chinese economy, migration and labour, and observational documentary. Who it's not for: The scenes of family conflict are uncomfortable and the camera's presence in them is ethically open to question. The telling is also slow.