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.
Panel Statement:
Visually engrossing, storytelling which presents the
micro and macro aspects of our time, Up The Yangtze works on every cinematic level.
-
Terrance Odette
Yung Chang is a Canadian filmmaker based in Montreal. He has a degree in
film production from Montreal's Concordia University and has studied the Meisner technique at New
York's Neighborhood Playhouse.
His first documentary film, Earth To Mouth, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, won
praise for its beautifully crafted meditation on food production and migrant labour. He displays a
remarkable sense of cinematic storytelling in his first feature-length documentary, Up the Yangtze,
in which the contested Three Gorges Dam forms an unsettling backdrop to a richly detailed narrative
of life inside contemporary China.