National Post
Feature
Winds of Chang; Canadian director captures upheaval in the new
China
Friday, February 8, 2008
Byline: Chris Knight
Canadian director Yung Chang's movie Up the Yangtze is about the social upheaval literally following in the wake of China's massive Three Gorges Dam, which has flooded vast valleys and forced the relocation of millions of people. It's actually the second film on the subject to open in Toronto this year, following Zhang Ke Jia's Still Life, currently playing at the Regent. Chang isn't surprised by the coincidence, however. "It's almost a genre of its own," he says of the hydroelectric project. "It's a huge, epic landscape that includes such microcosmic stories."
In some respects the films are quite different. Still Life uses the river as a backdrop for a fictional story about a man and a woman who each arrive in the city of Fengjie to search for missing spouses. Chang's film is a documentary, following two Chinese teenagers from very different walks of life who find employment on a luxury ship offering a "farewell cruise" along the river before it is changed forever. In tone and look, however, the two movies play as adjacent chapters in the story of China's vast social and economic changes.
If Up the Yangtze sometimes seems too perfectly dramatic to be a documentary, it's all because of good luck, says Chang. "I wanted to find a girl and a boy, and each of them had to be directly affected by the river," he says. To that end, he approached an American-managed Yangtze cruise company, which gave him complete access to its ships and staff. He joined a recruitment drive and met his main characters, 16-year-old Yu Shui and 19-year-old Chen Bo Yu, before they started work on the Victoria Queen. During their three months of employment, the dirt-poor Yu Shui gradually comes out of her shell; Chen Bo Yu, an only child with a ridiculous sense of entitlement, becomes if anything even more vainglorious.
Chang's filmmaking style also allowed his subjects to open up to him. In fact, he kept in touch with Yu Shui; after she saw the film, "she wrote to me and said she was able to see her destiny and her fate. She had decided to leave the boat and go to high school."
The film's production company, EyeSteelFilm, pitched in to pay for her education, and Chang is soliciting donations to help her family (www.givemeaning.com/project/yufam). Given that the film hopes to earn money, he says, "it's twisted not to think you wouldn't want to compensate the family for their help."
Asked about government permits for filming in China, Chang says he simply slipped under the radar. He was born in Canada and lives in Montreal, but his parents are Chinese, so he didn't look out of place with his local crew. "We were like from the local media, the local news station," he says. If any government officials started asking questions, "We said we were shooting a promotional video for the tour company."
Chang's next project is more problematic. "In my mind it's a no-holds-barred, pull-all-strings film about the Tiananmen massacre." The 30-year-old filmmaker was shocked to find that people of Yu Shui's generation don't even know about the 1989 event. "I recall marching in Toronto to the [Chinese consulate]," he says. Then just 12 years old, Chang says he also remembers seeing a diplomat inside the embassy using a long-lens camera to photograph the crowd. He stuck out his tongue.