This year’s winner at the Amsterdam documentary film festival is Last Train Home by the Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan. Millions of migrant Chinese workers take a break from their harsh living conditions to return to their native villages for the Chinese New Year, braving long journeys on crowded trains. Adult diapers are one of the highest selling items of the new year as overcrowded trains means it is impossible for passengers to access the toilets. Fan’s documentary deals with a Chinese couple, the Zhangs, who have not met their teenage daughter for three years, their traumas of both the travel and the reunion.
The documentary has been praised for its photography and construction. Fan said he gained the trust of the Zhangs after he opened himself up to them and they reposed their moments of sorrow and hopes in him. Fan was involved in the making of another documentary, Up the Yangtze, about the Three Gorges dam before getting the chance to direct one of his own but found financing initially hard to come by.
He dedicated Last Train Home to the Chinese migrant workers, “people who toil in the factories and make everything that we use”.
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