Last Train Home

Lixin Fan is quickly becoming a documentary filmmaker to watch. The Canadian-based Chinese filmmaker co-produced Up the Yangtze, a 2007 exploration of the march of capitalism through the Yangtze River Valley, as plans to build a massive dam uprooted families from their agrarian ways of life. His first documentary as a director is Last Train Home, which is similar in its approach, in its subtle cinematography and in its message. Every year, trains transport more than 100 million Chinese workers from the cities to their homes for the New Year’s holiday, raising very real questions about how a country this size can survive as a rising industrial power when it is still far behind the times in so many ways and in so many places. China’s growing pains are very real in Last Train Home, in a powerful film worth seeking out.