Last Train Home ( Último tren a casa ) ( To teleftaio treno tou gyrismou )

Last Train Home (DVD) (*)

Out of Stock

Original Title: Último tren a casa
Alternate Title: To teleftaio treno tou gyrismou
Screened, competed or awarded at:
Sundance Film Festival
Other Film Festival Awards

Language Selections:
Chinese ( Dolby Digital Stereo )
English ( Subtitles )

Product Origin/Format:
United Kingdom ( PAL/Region 2 )

Running Time:
85 min + 3 min extras

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.78:1)

Special Features:
Interactive Menu
Scene Access
Trailer(s)

Movie filmed in 2009 and produced in:
Canada ( USA, Canada )
China ( India, Eastern Asia )
United Kingdom ( Great Britain, Ireland )

Directed By:
Lixin Fan

Written By:
Lixin Fan

Actors:
Suqin Chen ..... Herself
Changhua Zhan ..... Himself (Documentary Subject)
Qin Zhang ..... Herself
Yang Zhang ..... Himself (Documentary Subject)

Synopsis:

Last Train Home follows a Chinese Family as they leave their daughter and family to look for work in more industrialized areas. They leave the country side and begin working in a cheap clothing factory. The film spans over two years observing the familys struggles for money as they attempt to keep their relationships intact.

According to an introductory note that appears on screen at the beginning of Lixin Fan's documentary 'Last Train Home," every year, during the lunar New Year, 130 million workers return from China's industrial cities to their homes in the countryside. This temporary shift in population, which the film calls the largest human migration in the world, is one of those numbers that seem impossible to comprehend. One hundred and thirty million people, moving between work and family, stoking the engines that drive the machinery of worldwide consumer capitalism. What does that look like? What does it mean? To suggest an answer to the first question, Mr. Fan, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker whose guile and courage with the camera can seem almost magical, looks down at a throng of migrants pressing toward the train station in the southern city of Guangzhou. The crush of faces, possessions and umbrellas looks almost like an abstract composition, until you are in the middle of it, at which point it becomes chaotic and overwhelming. In what looks almost like a random encounter, Mr. Fan zeroes in on two individuals, a married couple whose travails will provide a painful, local illumination of a huge and complicated social phenomenon. Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, who come from a rural village in Sichuan province, 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. Zhang Qin, their daughter, is a high school student when the film starts, 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 long cycle of sacrifice and suffering propelled by changes in state policy and shifts in the global economy.

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.

This product was added to our catalog on Thursday 25 November, 2010.