Globe and Mail Article from Sundance
Canadian navigates China's cultural shift
Director Yung Chang had
planned to make a sardonic film about tourism -then he saw the chance to tell a much bigger
story
LIAM LACEY
February 7, 2008 at 3:26 AM EST
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.
Up the Yangtze was picked as one of the top 10 Canadian films of last year by a jury selected by the Toronto International Film Festival. Reviewers have picked up that the title of the film echoes a distinctly Western idiom, "up the creek," to describe the family's plight. In the film, Chang tells an upstairs/downstairs story that he compares to Robert Altman's Gosford Park that works as a metaphor for a social transformation full of contradictions, loss and unexpected moments of humour.
Part of his film follows a popular tourist boat, the Victoria Queen, as it takes tourists on a "farewell tour" of an area about to be flooded to build the massive Three Gorges dam, wiping out an area where civilization has existed for 5,000 years. The secondary story is a portrait of the impoverished Yu family, peasants who are squatting on the edge of China's great central river, among the two million people who will be relocated because of the dam. Their teenaged daughter, Yu Shui, manages to get a job on the boat, where she is renamed "Cindy" for the benefit of the tourists, and given instructions on proper behaviour by their zealous supervisor: Don't call the guests fat or pale (Chinese compliments); don't mention Quebec separatism to the Canadians.
Chang took the journey himself with his parents and grandparents in 2002 and, initially, he had an idea of making a sardonic documentary about cultural tourism called Up Your Yangtze, but as he began to explore the subject, he realized that tourism was only the symptom of a much more profound Chinese cultural shift.
Chang grew up comfortably middle-class as a doctor's son in Whitby, Ont., in the 1980s, though he felt his minority status acutely.
His best friend was Indian-Canadian and he says many white kids at school assumed that they were brothers. Later, as a boarder at the prestigious Upper Canada College, he became determined to learn more about his Chinese roots, studying Mandarin and immersing himself in Chinese cinema. The Tiananmen Square massacre had a big impact and he hopes to make his next documentary about the events of June 4, 1989, as seen from several perspectives.
His parents, worried about his professional future, made him take a career aptitude test, which showed he might be suited to being a filmmaker. Currently, his younger brother is studying Chinese medicine in China. "To our parents' chagrin, we're both fascinated by this country they were so anxious to put behind them."
Chang, who studied film at Montreal's Concordia University, made his first short film with the National Film Board. Called Earth to Mouth, it was about a Chinese market garden outside Toronto. Up the Yangtze, produced by Montreal's EyeSteel films (his producer, Daniel Cross, was his first-year professor at university) with the National Film Board and development money from CBC, is his first feature.
Ultimately, Chang wants to direct fictional movies and he acknowledges that Up the Yangtze "was, in many ways, shot and edited as if it were a fictional film." He and his Chinese cinematographer, Wang Shi Qing, had a motto: "Cinema, not documentary."
Once Chang was given permission to film life on the boat by the American-owned company that runs the tours, he used its recruiting sessions at local schools as his casting calls. He wanted a girl (Yu Shui); he wanted a boy (the cocky Chen Bo Yu); he wanted an urban and rural contrast, and someone from a home that was about to be flooded.
Chang studied acting for two years, learning the Meisner method at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, while working as a film editor. His instinct for the dramatic moment shows in the film:
"The technique is not voodoo, but it teaches you how to listen," Chang says. "I learned to wait for the right moment. The power of a camera is that it provokes conversation between people."
A pivotal example is a moment when Chang asks the daughter, Yu Shui, on the day she is leaving, to ask the mother about the family's future. Chang knew that the mother, normally reticent, would not volunteer the information. As the mother speaks, she begins crying on camera.
"I felt the question had to be asked," Chang says. "We were all in tears. You can see the camera shaking."
The key, Chang says, was that his relationship with the family was more than professional. He has helped raise money for the children's schooling and the father's cataract surgery.
"I can't ever think of just picking a film subject. It's a lifetime commitment. That's the only way you have the right to ask for that level of intimacy."
Up the Yangtze opens in Toronto on Friday at the Cumberland Cinemas, in Vancouver at the Ridge on Feb. 15, in Montreal at the AMC Forum on Feb. 22 and in Ottawa at the Bytowne on Feb. 29.