Vancouver Sun Interview with Yung Chang
Three Gorges Dam film
a box office success
Yvonne Zacharias - Vancouver Sun
Friday, February 15, 2008
In China, the mighty Yangtze is known simply as The River.
In 2002, Yung Chang, a young fledgling Montreal filmmaker of Chinese descent, went down The River with his parents and his grandfather on one of the so-called farewell cruises.
The aim was to offer tourists the chance to visit the area before it was flooded by the Three Gorges Dam, which when it is finished will be the biggest hydroelectric dam in history.
The filmmaker's eye clicked in. Chang immediately saw the opportunity to take the story of the biggest engineering endeavor since the Great Wall and give it a human face by telling it through the eyes of a peasant family.
The result, Up The Yangtze, a co-production between the National Film Board and Montreal-based EyeSteelFilm, has just scored a major-box office success.
Coming in with a total of $21,714 for Friday, Feb. 8, to Sunday, Feb. 10, on one screen at Toronto's Cumberland Cinemas, the film has had the highest box office for any one screen in Canada (other than 3D presentations of Hannah Montana and U2-3D).
Now, the filmmaker and his film are in Vancouver for three shows daily (2:30, 7 and 9 p.m.) at the Ridge Theatre, starting today and ending Sunday, with Chang available for questions after each one.
The film is poignantly beautiful, weaving sweeping views of the river into the arc of one family's story.
Over coffee Thursday morning, Chang, with a glint of success in his eye, said the journey of making this film was not an easy one. It took him four years to secure the financing and to research and develop the story.
The other problem was the initial suspicion toward him by his Chinese film crew, a suspicion that Chang was eventually able to overcome. It helped that he speaks Mandarin.
Nevertheless, he was at the outset regarded as a foreigner with an odd message.
Why, they wondered, did he want to portray a peasant family in a sympathetic light?
Was this going to be an anti-China film?
About 60 per cent of China's population are peasants but they are generally looked down upon by the remaining 40 per cent, explained Chang.
"I had to convince them that I was not coming in with a western point of view but that I wanted to get behind and find the human story."
The other challenge was building a level intimacy and trust to work with his subjects, the Yu family, subsistence farmers who live along the Yangtze River near Fengdu, the so-called Ghost City. Having already been displaced once, the impoverished family, was faced with another forced move because of the dam.
The film zeroes in on their 16-year-old daughter, Cindy Yu Shui, who would like to continue her education but is forced to go to work on the luxury cruises to make ends meet.
"I was gaining a window into someone else's life," said Chang. "I didn't want to feel that he was exploiting that relationship."
Chang is happy to report that he has stayed in touch with the family and that Yu Shui still fondly calls him "Big Brother."
There was more than one ghost in this film. The Canadian-born Chang grew up with one foot in Chinese culture and the other in Canadian culture.
As a child in Whitby, Ont., his was the only Chinese family in town. Then he went on to an Anglican-based school in Toronto where he didn't exactly fit in either.
"This is a movie about displacement. Being a displaced ghost helped me to make the movie."