Every year, more than 130 million Chinese migrant workers head home for the Lunar New Year, creating the largest annual human migration on Earth.
Trailer for “Last Train Home”
You Can’t Make This Sh!t Up
- Train stations become so packed that people climb through windows, sleep on floors, and wait days just to buy a ticket.
- The Zhangs spend 16 years working ~1,000 miles from home in a Guangzhou garment factory. They see the daughter they left behind only once a year because they can’t afford to stop working.
- After sacrificing almost two decades so their children can have a better future, their teenage daughter announces she’d rather quit school and work in a factory. She is following the exact path her parents desperately wanted her to escape.
Watch “Last Train Home”
You can watch “Last Train Home” on Apple TV.
Ratings:
- My Rating: 90/100
- IMDb Rating: 7.6/10
- Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: 87/100 (Users); 100/100 (Critics)
Director’s Note: Lixin Fan spent several years following the Zhang family rather than just filming one holiday trip. That long-term access lets you watch the children grow up, the parents age, and the family’s relationships slowly unravel under the pressure of migrant labor.
Release Date: January 2010 (Sundance Film Festival)
Other Unique Stuff
- The doc captures the chaos of China’s Spring Festival travel season with stunning scenes of packed train stations, exhausted travelers, police barricades, and families desperately trying to squeeze onto overcrowded trains.
- The doc won numerous international awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA).
Wrap Up:
“Last Train Home” is about parents trying to buy their children a better future, only to discover the cost may be their family itself. It’s quiet, human, and one of the best docs I’ve seen about the price of economic progress.
Thanks for reading!
Heather Fenty, Guest Writer, Daily Doc