LAST TRAIN HOME DATE: SATURDAY, MAY 1 TIME: 3:30 PM VENUE: Sunset 5 BUY TICKETS ENCORE PRESENTATION DATE: FRIDAY, MAY 7 TIME: 4:30 PM VENUE: DWNTN ONLINE TICKETS ARE NOT AVAILABLE FOR THE ENCORE SCREENING. YOU MAY BUY TICKETS AT THE BOX OFFICE.

LAST TRAIN HOME
(Canada, 2009) Dir.: Lixin Fan
35mm, 87 min., color, documentary, in Mandarin w/ E.S.

Imagine that there was no car to get around, and you were just one of the millions of people fighting over the last few train tickets home. Every spring, more than 130 million migrant workers in China try to go home for New Years and to see their loved ones for a couple of days. Opening with the images of the masses not only waiting for a train, but for actual tickets left over to be sold, LAST TRAIN HOME follows the Zhangs’ tumultuous journey, the expectations and desires of the individual family members, and the silent, but resilient battle to achieve a better life.

Starting off with the parents, two textile workers, and their week-long battle over two train tickets, we find grandmother Zhang at their quiet and rural home, planting the fields, serving dinner to the two grandchildren. “Take more rice,” she tells the kids, “so you will walk faster to school.” “Eat more of the bitter melon,” she reminds them, “so you won’t get pimples” – and the adolescent Qin hurries to grab a whole bunch of them. Qin’s dream is to leave home behind and make her own living as an independent young woman. To the horror of her returning parents, whose entire life project is based in providing their children with a better future, the rebellious daughter plans to drop out of school to start life as a migrant worker, too. Being forced to work far away from home, while frequently weak and sick, with long hours of night shifts and no prospects of a fulfilling retirement, the parents try to change their daughter’s mind. Still, Qin remains stubborn and finally departs. She confesses that in the end, there is no feeling of love for her parents. She rationalizes that her absence of love for them is a result of their own absence.

The effects of global economy on a family’s personal life could not have been depicted better. Fan — producer of Yung Chang’s UP THE YANGTZE (Festival 2008) — succeeds in combining the epic with the minute, bringing together vast images of industrial landscape filled with stirring, angry, yet always monitored masses with the very silent and, at times embarrassingly, intimate depictions of a family.
— Feng-Mei Heberer

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COMMUNITY CO-PRESENTER: OCA – OC; IDA