‘The Last Train Home’ is movie depicting a typical Chinese family

‘The Last Train Home’ is movie depicting a typical Chinese family in their rush to go back home for the New Year’s holiday. In the spring, china cites are thrust into confusion as 130 million-immigrant workers voyage to their home for the New Year. This is the world’s greatest movement of human, depicting how China is caught between an industrious future and the rural past. This movie is of a couple, Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin from rural China who due to frustrations of joblessness travel to an industrial city leaving their two children behind with their grandparents. The only time the couple gets to see their children is during the annual celebrations of the New Year.  The director or the filmmaker follows the couple during the course of some years as they make the journey home, only to find out the family is falling apart. The parent and the children have become strangers after years of being apart, and the children have grown to despise their parents. Tie Xi Qu – West of the Track is a film that documents the inevitable death of a superseded manufacturing system. Tie Xi is a huge industrial complex northeast of China Shenyang province. The documentary was filmed in a period of two years between 1999 to 2001, documenting the last of the factory workers, a class that was once promised glory during the Chinese revolution. The workers are now trapped in a strange economic, making the documentary a moving film of the modern blockbuster. The documentary is a moving picture of Chinese society in transition. Although the China is the home of the tallest skyscrapers and the fastest economic growth, the films show the irony in this growth by depicting a society that is yet to experience the economic and technological changes.

Ironically, both of these movies have received positive remarks from critics, although they depict a society that is still suffering in the face of so much technological advancement and a vast economy. To those in the west, both movies will tug the heartstrings of many and make them feel lucky and more than a little advantaged. These movies are incredibly uncomfortably powerful and the direction reflects an entire way of life that the wealthier parts of the world take for granted. These documentary films offer a human scale look at the impacts of China’s industrial growth.

The Last Train Home is an epic spectacle that tells much about china, a country in the midst of dumping traditional ways while it dashes towards modernity and global economic dominance. This film depicts the fractured life of a single migrant family caught up in the desperation of the annual migration, resulting from the haste in economic change. The couple lives their children and progress into the city with the hope that wages would lift the family into a better life. However, the irony is that the children hopes for a better future are loosened by their parents’ nonexistence. Qin, one of the children, has grown into a teenager battled by a sense of abandonment. Although this film is uncomfortable and depicts a sense of a hopeless society, it comes away with the intense feeling that it is the right of the Chinese migrant workers to improve their standards of living. The price to change may seem too high but their no other way to pursue a better life (Last Train Home review). This film makes the viewer think and talk about some of the issues discussed and not discussed in the film.

This documentary is part of the prodigious movies of the innovative century and undoubtedly one of the mainly spectacular debuts that documents the fading of an entire labor force and community. Tie Xi district encompasses numerous factories alongside smelting plants constructed during the 1930s period in order to create munitions for the Imperial Army of Japan, following the bolstering by Soviet technology. The documentary centers on the demise of numerous factories such as the sheet metal plant, the lead and zinc melting works, alongside the electrical cable plant, which are on the brink of elimination. The conditions of living are, needless to mention, dreadful to the western eyes, even though that does not imply that, the dynamism of Bing’s documentary is not widespread. For instance, in the U.K., there have been numerous cases of livelihoods going to the dogs, mainly in the industrial plants located in the north including the coalmines, the longstanding cotton mills, the paper mills, the docks, and even the shoe plants, which all sacrifice on the altar of development (TIE XI QU: WEST OF THE TRACKS). Tie Xi, which was once a manufacturing epicenter of northern eastern China, has fallen victim to multiple factory closures and changes in policy in regards to government backed industry. The movie charts the decay of the industries in a painstakingly detail showing a vivid picture of the split in contemporary china between the legacy of communism and capitalism.

These movies reflects the reality of what is happening in developing countries as they hurtle to reach the vast and well established West. These movies make their viewers realize the discrepancies between what is taught and the truth. The viewers get to see they have been living in unreality and the world we perceive is untrue. The reality of what Chinese population goes through is a sore sight, resulting from the government refusal to equalize the transition from a communism society to capitalism.