Farewell tour of the Yangtze River
Jesse Ferreras, Special To North Shore News Published: Friday, October 12, 2007
- Up the Yangtze (Canada 2007). Director: Yung Chang. World premiere.
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. A camera shoots from the deck of a cruiseship as it passes through the dam's gates. The sky only appears in a narrow slit between the boat and the gates as the camera looks upward.
The image makes an imposing introduction for director Yung Chang's nostalgic hymn to the river, whose surface is expected to rise to 175 metres, flooding communities along its banks and displacing over a million people once the massive structure is completed.
Chang's film has been screening as part of the Canadian Images program at the Vancouver International Film Festival and is nominated for the $2,500 NFB Best Canadian Documentary Award, whose results will be announced at the Closing Gala tonight.
Chang, who grew up in Whitby, Ont., says that the inspiration for his sophomore film came during a trip to China in 2002.
"The flooding hadn't begun yet, so I think at the time it was really instilled in me this really deep and utter awe of the magnitude of what was going to happen to that river," he said. "Everywhere I looked, I would ask people, is that town going to disappear? What's going to happen to that temple, that bridge?"
His earliest recollections of the Yangtze are coloured by the stories his grandfathers used to tell him. They instilled in young Chang what he calls a "pastoral, romantic" notion of the river.
Both my grandfathers left China in 1949, and I guess ever since childhood, they would always tell me, and instill in me this kind of sense of what it used to be like in China, Chang says. That's what I went to China with, a head full of these romantic notions."
Up the Yangtze follows a so-called "farewell cruise" along the Yangtze, as tourists from all over the world board luxury cruiselines to see the communities along the river's banks before they are flooded. The story of a boat trip gazing upon a threat to nature helped construct a film that for Chang was part Love Boat and part Apocalypse Now.
"You've got this boat that represents so much. Above deck it's westerners, below deck it's the Chinese (workers) looking up," he said. "It's like this fishbowl, and it's riding downriver to this giant megadam, this symbol of modernization. So it was just so epic for me... that journey was important for me and I had to make it."
Chang found his way to Victoria Cruises, which ran the "farewell trips" along the Yangtze, through a chance encounter with the owner's son.
"It turned out that the owner of the ship, his son... he's a bit of a wild kind of guy with tattoos all over his body, he was like Kurtz," Chang says.
"I went to visit him and he actually very openly gave me permission to shoot on the boat, with all access... I kept milking that connection for as long as I could for four years. I think they were pretty annoyed by me by the end."
Chang's access to Victoria Cruises allowed him to observe the company's recruitment process, which led him to the two people who form the human element of Up the Yangtze.
One is Cindy Yu Shui, a young girl whose impoverished family lives in a hut threatened by the river's flooding. They are so poor that they depend on Cindy to send them money by asking her to work for Victoria Cruises.
The other is Chen Bo (Jerry) Yu, an arrogant, handsome middle-class young adult attracted by the lure of making money.
"Every winter the cruiseline would send out their management to look for people (who) would come to the interviews," he said. "People would come to the interviews, and one of them was Yu Shui, and the other one was Jerry. And there was a whole bunch, it was like a casting call for me and I treated it like that."
As the boat travels along the Yangtze, the film delves deeper into the lives of these characters. It gives special attention to Cindy, whose family is drastically affected by the flooding.
While she is washing dishes and greeting guests on the cruise, her family's home is subsumed in the rising water and they are forced to move to a decrepit apartment inland.
It's a nightmare come true for many living along the Yangtze, as the Chinese government has put the river in the service of the world's biggest hydroelectric project -- five times the size of the Hoover Dam.
Up the Yangtze, he says, was a journey he felt he needed to make to let people know how China is changing and how it will affect its people. "It felt like the defining film about China, so I gave it a shot," Chang said. "You can see the Heart of Darkness association more... once you start you can't stop, you have to keep going and you have to finish the film."
As for the dam, its walls were completed in May 2006, according to a Chinese government press release. The structure is expected to be fully operational in 2009.