Favorite New Films: Up the Yangtze
posted by The Joe
China’s Three Gorges Dam, responsible for the displacement of four million people in order to provide much-needed energy, has quickly become a fascinating subject of cinema. First focused on in Manufactured Landscapes and Zhang Ke Jia’s Still Life, Chinese Canadian Yung Chang now brings us his award-winning Up the Yangtze.
This incredibly powerful, poetic documentary follows the lives of workers on tour boats that cruise along the Yangtze River in China to look at the abandoned ruins which will soon be flooded by the Dam. The main focus is the struggle of a poor village family being affected by the project, contrasting the surreal, gaudy ridiculousness of the tour boat and its customers. It’s a complex and moving look into collateral damage that never turns preachy, providing remarkable insight into modern Chinese life and its wavering, uncertain future.
Up the Yangtze is currently playing in Minneapolis at the Lagoon Cinema.
Up the Yangtze - Trailer
Yung Chang on The Hour