"China's Three Gorges Dam is considered by many experts to be a full-steam-ahead eco-disaster, but helmer Yung Chang's gorgeous meditation is more concerned with the project's collateral human damage: old farmers evicted, young people in servitude to Western tourists, all brought about by an endeavor whose collective weight may ultimately tilt the Earth's axis. A gloriously cinematic doc of epic, poetic sadness..." More
Globe and Mail Article from Sundance
PARK
CITY, UTAH - Everything went right for Yung Chang at the Sundance Film Festival. Within days of the
festival's opening, his documentary, Up the Yangtze, landed distribution deals in the United States
and Canada. The 30-year-old Canadian filmmaker found celebrities from Quentin Tarantino to Isabella
Rossellini expressing interest in his film. At a party, a stranger handed him $600 (U.S.) in cash to
help out the Yu family, whose predicament is at the centre of his film about life in the heart of
contemporary China... More
Globe and Mail Review
Entire cities, towns and villages will be
drowned. Two million relocated persons will lose their homes, their heritage and perhaps their
livelihoods. But before that, before that marvel of human engineering - China's Three Gorges Dam -
completes its legacy of human upheaval, there are vanishing sights to be seen. So luxury cruise
ships are taking Western tourists on "farewell tours" up the Yangtze River, the better to witness
the past even as it disappears into the future. And those ships, like most, can be viewed as
microcosms. Look closely above and below their decks, as Conrad and Melville once did, and you'll
find there a bounty of rich stories, a chronicle of turmoil and hope... More
Montreal Gazette Review
On the face of it, a feature
documentary about a hydroelectric dam in China does not sound like the most exciting of films. But
Montreal director Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze is completely captivating - and anything but a dull
slice of pedagogical filmmaking - because Chang wisely focuses on the personal in this look at the
fallout from the absurdly ambitious Three Gorges Dam project... More
Now Magazine Review
Up The Yangtze, Yung Chang's remarkable debut feature about the ordinary people caught up in
China's economic boom, floats somewhere between Manufactured Landscapes and Still Life.
It's set largely on a big luxury cruise ship that travels up and down the Yangtze River. Onboard are
Western tourists who want to see the country's hillside towns and villages before they're flooded by
the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in the world... More
Georgia Straight Review
In Up the Yangtze, talented writer-director Yung Chang enjoys long, uninterrupted takes,
particularly of the tale's central cruise ship gliding through the mist of that titular river. But
there's nothing superfluous or aesthetically fussy about this superb National Film Board
documentary, which manages to combine the personal with the political and the poetic without
hammering the viewer on any front... More
Georgia Straight Interview with Yung Chang
Quebec-based filmmaker Yung Chang had just come home from Park City, Utah, still overwhelmed by
the rapturous response of audiences at the Sundance Film Festival to his first feature, Up the
Yangtze, when the Georgia Straight caught up with him... More
National Post
Feature
Canadian director Yung Chang's movie Up the Yangtze is about the social
upheaval literally following in the wake of China's massive Three Gorges Dam, which has flooded vast
valleys and forced the relocation of millions of people. It's actually the second film on the
subject to open in Toronto this year, following Zhang Ke Jia's Still Life, currently playing at the
Regent... More
Vancouver Sun Review
New employees aboard China's Victoria Queen, a
luxury river liner plying the Yangtze, are given specific instructions on how to treat the mostly
Western passengers: Don't compare Canada to the United States. Avoid discussing Quebec separation,
Northern Ireland, royalty or politics. Do not call anyone old, pale or fat. (Use "plump.") The
anachronism "foreign devils" is right out... More
Vancouver Sun Interview with Yung Chang
In China, the mighty Yangtze
is known simply as The River.
In 2002, Yung Chang, a young fledgling Montreal filmmaker of Chinese descent, went down The River
with his parents and his grandfather on one of the so-called farewell cruises... More
Metro Review
Yung
Chang's documentary Up The Yangtze considers the socio-economic impact of China's massive Three
Gorges Dam project through the eyes of the Chinese citizens suffering its effects, and from the
Chinese-Canadian filmmaker's outsider perspective, as a visiting Westerner... More
TIFF: Canada's Top Ten
Yung Chang's luminous documentary focuses on the people who live alongside China's Yangtze River,
many of whom are being uprooted as a result of the Three Gorges Dam project. Hauntingly photographed
by Wang Shi Qing, the stories are simultaneously heartbreaking and affirming... More
Up The Yangtze ****
There have been, and will be, many films dealing with the flooding of China's Yangtze River. This one is not to be missed. Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang goes back to the river where his grandfather grew up and documents the end of a way of life... More
IDFA Jury Report
A sensitive, humane and cinematic story about the
struggle for existence in the face of immense change and an unknown future. With touching characters
and moments of pure poetry. UP THE YANGTZE!, directed by Yung Chang... More
Schema Magazine Review
Perhaps the most ironic statement in Yung Chang's film Up the Yangtze is
that of an elderly gentleman as he watches the waters of the Yangtze River rise: "Our country must
be very strong and prosperous, we can stop the river." Mao's dream to stop the river at the Three
Gorges Dam, the subject of the Chang's film has indeed altered the lives of the people along the
Yangtze River. For many the prosperity that China seeks from damming the river has come at a price
too few can afford... More
Farewell tour of the Yangtze River
The Three Gorges Dam takes on the air of a leviathan monster in the documentary Up the Yangtze.
The film's opening image is a low-angle shot of the dam, a structure that stretches the width of China's famous Yangtze River... More
VIFF: Up the Yangtze, no paddle
Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, or the three-hour lecture beforehand, but I left Up the Yangtze, feeling utterly shattered — entirely shaken to my core... More
In my capacity helping to program world festivals and as an international critic, I have seen few films over the last few years on this general subject that are as strong and aesthetically pleasing as this one... More
"Don't compare Canada with the United States," the man in the striped shirt says in Chinese to the new recruits assembled in front of him as the luxury cruise ship prepares to take its passengers - many of them westerners - up the Yangtze River... More
For 20 years, I've read every detail that has leaked out of China about the Three Gorges dam. But nothing, before this film, has put me so vividly in the shoes of citizens affected by this dam. "Up the Yangtze" gives life to all the statistics and mind boggling details... More
"Watching Up the Yangtze is one of those experiences that reinvigorates and restores your faith in the documentary film medium. Full of stunning images of contemporary China, it shows us the unsettling pace at which the nation’s cultures are shifting... More