Metro
Review
Exploring China's heart and soul
Up The Yangtze looks into the impact of the Three Gorges Dam
Up The Yangtze
Stars: Yu Shui, Chen Bo Yu
Director: Yung Chang
**** (out of five)
Yung Chang's documentary Up The Yangtze considers the socio-economic impact of China's massive Three Gorges Dam project through the eyes of the Chinese citizens suffering its effects, and from the Chinese-Canadian filmmaker's outsider perspective, as a visiting Westerner.
The common link between these two angles is a Chinese cruise ship, taking Western tourists up the river — which, as a result of the dam, is slowly flooding farms and towns and even cities, forcing the displacement of more than a million people to higher ground.
Chang's camera drops in on the tourists from time to time, eating sumptuous meals in the dining hall, touring rows of shiny new townhomes (built for displaced citizens by their generous government, insists the smiling Potemkin-village guide) and even taken to the massive dam for a little tour.
But mostly he's interested in the personal journeys of two of the boat's employees: Yu Shui and Chen Bo Yu, locals who have been hired by the cruise line and given Western names ("Cindy" and "Jerry," respectively), and who must negotiate the second society within the ship, subsuming their identities for menial jobs that still offer better paydays than anything they could get at home.
This is not the first movie to glide along the edge of the Three Gorges Dam project; Jennifer Baichwal's Manufacturing Landscapes touched on its potentially catastrophic ecological impact, and Jia Zhang-ke's moody drama Still Life explored the effects of displacement in far richer detail. But it goes almost without saying that the project is so big it can't be covered by just one film, and Up The Yangtze has enough insights of its own to stand in their company.
norman wilner for Metro Toronto