Up the Yangtze
Everything in China is leaning towards the extremes, including the biggest fastest transformation into modernity. Nowhere is the relentless push toward the extreme felt more than in the mind-boggling, humongous scale of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze. To make China's gigantic and impersonal change fathomable and personal, this documentary follows two young adults living in poverty along the Yangtze, and shadows them as they sign up to work on a tourist river boat delivering foreign visitors to the dam. Their story is a remarkable and surprisingly intimate portrait of two ordinary citizens doing what hundreds of millions of their Chinese cohorts are doing -- getting a job. Neither protagonist in this film is even particularly likeable or heroic, which makes their lives all the more real. Their faults and failures are universal. You get a very clear picture of how wrenching, how abrupt, how enticing these vast changes are. You have only to multiply this exceptional intimacy into two people's struggles by a billion to see the country.
So far, this tiny window is the best picture of big change in China that I've seen.
-- KK
Up the Yangtze
Yung Chang
2007, 93 min.
DVD, $27
Rent from Netflix
Available from Amazon
@Alex: I have seen Manufactured Landscapes. I thought the first part absolutely brilliant, some of the most stunning film ever. But then the focus of the documentary shifted, and shifted again, until it diffused that initial energy. In the end I thought it a good doc, probably worth seeing, but not a great one. Couldda been.
Posted by Kevin Kelly on December 8, 2008 at 8:50 AM
If you haven't seen it, "Manufactured Landscapes" about Edward Burtynsky spends a lot of time in China, specifically investigating in graphic detail the extremely huge infrastructure changes going on there. McDonough and Braungart of "Cradle to Cradle" fame are involved in this same transformation in China, as seen in the excellent VPRO documentary "Waste=Food". The PBS Frontline special "Young and Restless in China" is a good watch also -- a lengthy introduction to a group of individual Chinese.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_Landscapes >
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3058533428492266222 >
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/youngchina/ >
(Sorry if I posted this twice!)
Posted by Alex on December 7, 2008 at 9:23 AM