Last Train Home

Directed by Lixin Fan

(Not Rated)

***

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Last Train Home is “essential viewing for understanding our world,” said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. Each year, 130 million migrant workers in China leave industrial cities en masse to return to their native villages for the Chinese New Year. This arduous ritual “gets a human face in Lixin Fan’s extraordinary, vital documentary,” in which the Chinese-Canadian director introduces us to a single family. The experience of Zhang Changhua and his wife, Chen Suqin, proves “emblematic of the shattering human cost” of China’s rapid ascendance as an economic superpower, said Jeannette Catsoulis in NPR.com. Fifteen years ago, they left their poor rural village to seek work 1,300 miles away, in the city of Guangzhou. Their two children stayed behind with family, gradually growing apart from the parents who worked so hard to support them. This is the heartbreaking story of a family “caught, and possibly crushed, between the past and the future,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. “Multiplied by 130 million, it becomes a terrifying and sobering panorama of the present.”