Up The Yangtze
Canada, 2007, 93 mins
Director: Yung Chang
Website
7:00pm, Sat, Nov 3
at Paramount
Festivals
- nominated for the NFB Best Canadian Documentary Award.
- World premiere at Vancouver International Film Festival 2007
Description
The Three Gorges Dam, gargantuan and hotly contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle, provides the epic and unsettling backdrop for Up the Yangtze, a dramatic and disquieting feature documentary on life inside the 21st century Chinese dream.
Among the two million people losing their livelihood to the dam, the Yu family must send their daughter, Yu Shui, off to work as the waters around their village rise. In a bitter irony she's been hired by Farewell Cruises, part of the strange apocalyptic tourist trade that thrives along the river, offering a final glimpse of a legendary world of the Yangtze before it disappears forever.
With insight and cinematic flair, Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang takes us onboard to show a life that mirrors the hierarchy of the wider world, where Western
passengers take in the spectral views while Yu Shui toils in the galley down below.
Stunningly photographed and beautifully composed, Up the Yangtze juxtaposes the poignant and sharply observed details of the story of Yu Shui against the monumental and
ominous forces at work all around her.