TORONTO — Montreal filmmaker Lixin Fan endured a logistical nightmare while shooting his heralded debut feature documentary, Last Train Home, which is up for a Directors Guild of America Award next week.
The film profiles the plight of tens of millions of Chinese migrant workers who’ve left their impoverished, rural families so they can earn a living in big city factories.
As Fan filmed a migrant-worker couple going home during Chinese New Year in 2008 — the only time of year most migrant workers in the region get to go home — a snowstorm crippled almost half the country’s railway system.
“We went into this train station in the city of Guangzho where they work and I think 600,000 passengers got stuck in that railway station for a week,” Fan, who is up for a best-directing DGA Award, recalled in a recent phone interview from New York.
“I heard people were staying there for 10 days on that platform of the railway station. It was really like a battlefield.”
Police and military officers tried to restore order, but several people in the anxious crowd died. Fan and his film crew, meanwhile, were trying to keep a close eye on the couple they were documenting.
To make matters worse, cellphone service was down because the storm had jammed all the networks.
“Because it was so crowded, especially at night, you blink and you’ve lost them,” said Fan, 34, who was born in Wuhan in central China and moved to Canada in 2006, arriving in Toronto before settling in Montreal.
“We told them that if they didn’t see us around, to talk to the wireless microphone so my soundman could pick up where they were and we would go find them in the crowd of hundreds of thousands.”
As the film states, there are over 130 million migrant workers in China and their annual commute home during Chinese New Year is said to be the world’s largest single migration.
Fan said the migration started in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when China first opened up its door to a market economy and foreign companies set up factories along the coastal provinces.
“They were luring hundreds of millions of peasants to leave their village, their farmland, to travel south to those big cities to find work,” said Fan, who worked as a journalist at Chinese state broadcaster CCTV in Beijing and as an associate producer on the award-winning documentary “Up the Yangtze.”
“Many who left to find work were in their 20s or 30s. Most of them save up their salary and send it back to their families who still live back on the farm, ... they want their children to have education back in the village so that the kids won’t repeat their life.”
Last Train Home has won several awards on the film festival circuit and was on the Toronto International Film Festival’s list of Top 10 picks for 2010.
It also recently won a Golden Tomato Award from the website RottenTomatoes.com, which compiles film reviews and measures the percentage of favourable critiques.
The Zhang family profiled in the film is from Huilong village in Sichuan province.
Fan met them when while conducting research in factory neighbourhoods in Guangzho in 2006.
The Zhang parents have been working in a garment factory in Guangzho for about 16 years (the youngest child was just eight months old when they left their family) and they only get to see their children for a couple of weeks every year.
As the film shows, their children are now expressing feelings of abandonment.
“This is really not a stand-alone case,” said Fan. “Millions of families are like this with long-term separation ... so it’s creating a lot of problems.”
At the Jan. 29 ceremony in Los Angeles, Fan will compete against Academy Award-winning filmmakers Alex Gibney and Davis Guggenheim. Gibney is in the running for Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, while Guggenheim is nominated for Waiting for ’Superman.”
Rounding out the field is Charles Ferguson for Inside Job, about the economic crisis, and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger for the gritty war film Restrepo.