Up the Yangtze (DVD)

“An astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle.”
-Stephen Holden, The New York Times

“Mandatory viewing for anyone interested in the grim flipside to China’s rise to economic power.”
-Flaunt Magazine

China’s Yangtze River—and all of the life that surrounds it—is undergoing a truly astonishing transformation wrought by the largest hydroelectric project in history, the Three Gorges Dam. Canadian documentary filmmaker Yung Chang returns to the gorgeous, now-disappearing landscape of his grandfather’s youth to trace the surreal life of a “farewell cruise” that traverses the gargantuan waterway.

With touching humanism and wry wit, Chang follows the microcosmic society of the luxury liner and the bitter irony of a young girl sent to work as a dish-washer aboard the ship—to provide for her peasant family as the river’s floodwaters drive them from their home. Up the Yangtze gives a human dimension to the wrenching changes facing not only an increasingly globalized China, but the world at large.

Also available on DVD as part of the box set CHINA ON FILM: THE NEW MILLENNIUM.