Last Train Home

Director: Lixin Fan

2009 / 85min / 35mm

Using the microcosm of one family’s story, Chinese Canadian documentarian Fan explores an annual exodus that’s been described as the largest mass movement of people in the world: the homecoming journeys of nearly 130 million Chinese migrant workers to celebrate Lunar New Year. Her subjects are the Zhangs, a married couple who at the time of the film’s completion had for 16 years been making the annual pilgrimage from Guangzhou, where they’d found work at a garment factory, to their native Sichuan—these brief trips being the only time they would see their daughter, Qin, now grown into a rebellious teenager. “A beautifully shot, haunting and haunted large-scale portrait.”—Manohla Dargis, The New York Times