DIR. LIXIN FAN | 2009 | CANADA | 85 MIN. – Mandarin and Sichuan, with English subtitles

Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos, as all at once, a tidal wave of humanity attempts to return home by train. It is the Chinese New Year. The wave is made up of millions of migrant factory workers. Last Train Home, an emotionally engaging and visually beautiful debut film from Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan, draws us into the fractured lives of a single migrant family caught up in this desperate annual migration. Sixteen years ago, the Zhangs abandoned their young children to find work in the city, consoled by the hope that their wages would lift their children into a better life. In a bitter irony, the Zhang’s hopes for the future are undone by their very absence. Intimate and candid, the film paints a human portrait of the dramatic changes sweeping China.

“The mind-boggling scope of first-time director Lixin Fan’s extraordinary documentary—which captures the world's largest migration, as 130 million migrant workers in China's cities return to their rural homes for New Year's—owes as much to macro-spectacle as to micro-observation about the economic forces rending a nation.” - Village Voice

“Lixin captures both the beauty of the film's rural and industrial settings and the fevered chaos of the family's public and domestic crises. While an overhead shot of a group of thousands of tightly packed workers lining up in the rain turns the masses into a lovely abstraction, their umbrellas adding patches of color to an otherwise monochrome painting, later ground-level shots capture with astonishing immediacy the confusion and desperation of the crowds forced to stand for days, waiting for the train after a snowstorm in another part of the country has knocked out the power grids.” - Andrew Schenker