Last Train Home

Each year China's 130 million migrant workers travel home to celebrate Chinese New Year with their families. These arduous journeys from smog-shrouded cities to ancestral villages populated only by the young and the old represent the world's largest human migration. They are also the only occasion that many parents will see the children that they have left in the care of grandparents. Last Train Home follows a single family as they negotiate both the tumult of a transport system stretched to breaking point, and the vast emotional gulfs that have been opened up between generations by China's embrace of consumer capitalism.

With a camera that has an almost supernatural ability to penetrate situations which are both physically terrifying (a stampede at a railway station) and emotionally overwhelming (a father's despair), this wonderful documentary is both an intimate study of human relations and a sobering portrait of a society being pulled apart by the centrifugal forces of unfettered development. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]