Tourists cruise China's Lesser Three Gorges in filmmaker Yung Chang's new documentary, Up the Yangtze. (Jonathan Chang/EyeSteelFilm/NFB in association with CBC Newsworld)
The Three Gorges Dam, on China’s Yangtze River, is the biggest hydroelectric river dam in the world. It has caused the mass relocation of millions, and forever altered the epic landscape of the region. For most of us, the sheer scale of the project is as unfathomable as the Great Wall, and as incomprehensible as China itself.
In the documentary Up the Yangtze, Oshawa, Ont.-born director Yung Chang brings the twin monoliths of the dam and China into tight focus, making sense of a foreign world by showing the humanity of a handful of people who live there.
The serio-comic film follows two young ship workers on a luxury “farewell cruise” up the eponymous waterway. Wealthy tourists death-watch a coast that will be flooded out of existence, while below stairs, lonely staffers struggle for tips and the holy grail of upward mobility. They are servers, dish pigs, greeters and guides, their Chinese names replaced by Anglo-friendly monikers like “Cindy” and “Jerry.” Says Chang of his film: “It’s Heart of Darkness meets Gosford Park meets The Love Boat.”
Up the Yangtze premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, and was the first sale at the Sundance Film Festival in January (U.S. distribution rights went to Zeitgeist Films). Chang, who is 30 and lives in Montreal, talked to CBCNews.ca about going crazy on the river, the vilification of China and how documentaries can save lives.
Q: How was Sundance?
A: Interesting. Surreal. You’re rubbing shoulders with all sorts of celebrities from Cheech Marin to Isabella Rossellini. In between, there was Patti Smith, Neil Young and Quentin Tarantino. He tried to get a ticket for the movie but couldn’t, which was crazy.
Q: You first went to the Yangtze in 2002 with your parents and grandparents. Was that the trip that inspired the film?
A: We were there for a luxury cruise, and we arrived in this huge Blade Runner city called Chongqing. We got there at night, jet-lagged. It was dusk, everything was in silhouette. These coolies were carrying our baggage down gangways. The river was lit up in neon lights. Then, as we approached the waiting cruise ship, this marching band appeared and struck up Yankee Doodle Dandy and You Are My Sunshine. At that moment, I knew I had a film.
Q: You follow two boat workers: Chen Bo Yu, a 19-year-old with the bravado of Tom Cruise, and 16-year-old Yu Shui, a wide-eyed, very poor girl from a coastal town. How did you find them?
A: In 2006, the cruise company gave me access to join them on their recruitment trips, where they go to the local river towns to look for employees. We had several months to make the relationship between filmmaker and subject equal. I wanted to treat them like friends, not subjects, and get invested in their lives and futures.
Q: That’s not how documentary filmmakers usually talk about their subjects. Aren’t you supposed to keep your objective distance, to take their stories and leave?Director Yung Chang. (Stephane Jolicoeur/EyeSteelFilm/NFB in association with CBC Newsworld)
A: Our mandate at EyeSteelFilm, which is my production company in Montreal, is not to do that. We believe in film as a tool for social change. We’re still in touch with Yu Shui’s family. We’ve started a fund to help her father get a cataract operation, and we’re paying for her to go to school. I showed her the movie in the summer, and she kind of saw her destiny and decided to go back to school. She’s back at home in Fengdu, the “Ghost City” that’s going to be mostly submerged one day.
Q: What’s it like to shoot a film in Communist China?
A: It helped that I’m Chinese and had a Chinese crew. We shot a back-up roll of footage that was all beautiful landscape shots, and when we did have run-ins with officials, we said we were making a promotional video for a cruise line. That was our way of getting around things. It happened once or twice. We weren’t that nervous.
Q: Were there any culture clashes for you as a Canadian working with a Chinese crew?
A: My director of photography had a lot of problems making a movie about peasants. He kept wondering why I wanted to shoot the negative aspects of China. Chinese are really sensitive about that stuff with the Olympics coming up. My justification was that in order to learn about contemporary China, you have to hear stories from all sides, and stories that are interesting dramatically are stories about people that have conflict. In the end, I found out that my DP was from a poor family himself, that his predicament was very similar to Yu Shui’s. He worked really hard and ended up getting into Beijing Film School, so there was a kind of mirror between them.
Q: You show the incontrovertible sadness of nearly two million people being displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, but also, we see how this project is a necessity, and a great hope for the country. That kind of ambivalence isn’t typical in reports about China these days.
A: I was trying to be conscious of the Chinese perspective. It’s very easy to come across and make some western imperialist statement. I don’t want to denigrate the beautiful Manufactured Landscapes, but there is a genre of doomsday filmmaking. It’s easy to say: “This poor country is doing everything wrong.” Maybe being between western and Chinese worlds myself, I was able to see both angles.
Up the Yangtze was the first film to be bought at this year's Sundance Film Festival. (Yung Chang/EyeSteelFilm/ NFB in association with CBC Newsworld)
Q: Did you have to stop yourself from making the tourists totally monstrous?
A: Tourists are very easy targets. I definitely scaled back. But I was so upset and irked by that cruise, I wanted to make a movie about the culture of tourism and the tourism of culture. When I was on the boat, I was at the mercy of what the Chinese tourism industry was feeding us, this ersatz version of Chinese culture. I befriended one of the crew workers in 2002, a bartender whose name was Willie. He came from a family that was relocated and he told me that his grandmother wouldn’t go. She would rather be drowned than leave her ancestral home. That was sobering.
Q: What filmmakers inspired you?
A: I like to say I had Herzog on Herzog strapped to my thigh while making the movie. I respond to his idea of going beyond surface, exploring ecstatic, cinematic truths. It was important to be open to that kind of spontaneity, to be able to improvise. I was really influenced by Chinese filmmaking and New Taiwanese filmmakers like Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Some of my non-film influences were Ed Burtynsky’s photographs, literary references like Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby. Everything, everything.
Q: Speaking of Werner Herzog and Apocalypse Now, there’s a not-so-great tradition of filmmakers going mad on the river. Did it have that effect on you?
A: As a filmmaker, you do feel like you’re Kurtz in a sense. For me, this was a pretty traumatic, very emotional experience. For me, making a film is like creating a monster, this savage beast that you’re trying to tame. You’re trying to keep up with the story you created. It’s not very calming. It’s a very conflicted, embattling process.
Q: Was part of that intensity a result of your personal connection to the place, with your parents being from Beijing and Shanghai?
A: Oh yeah, but I’ve always been enamoured with China, and Chinese culture. From a young age, I read Chinese literature in English. I’ve been travelling there since 1997. My brother moved back to Beijing. All of this is much to my parents’ chagrin, by the way. Their take is: Our families have sacrificed so much for you to grow up in the west, and now you’ve gone back. But I guess the new west is China. It’s the frontier now.Up the Yangtze opened in Toronto and Vancouver on Feb. 8. and will air on March 30 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld's The Passionate Eye.
Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.
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