In a recent interview during a tour to promote his feature documentary UP THE YANGTZE, writer-director YUNG CHANG confessed the film had its origins in a desire to expose the idiosyncrasies of the tourism industry in China, “When I was developing the film, this was going to be a movie called Up Your Yangtze, and it was going to be about the culture of tourism, and the tourism of culture.” TIM MILFULL reports.

A chance viewing of Aussie director Dennis O’Rourke’s Cannibal Tours—a doco about tourists seeking cannibals on Papua New Guinea’s Sepik River—made Chang realise the satirical angle had been exploited before. As he rode a riverboat on China’s Yangtze River with his grandfather, Chang decided there was a much more human angle to be taken when exploring the effect that the Three Gorges mega-dam project is having on many levels of Chinese society.

A chance discussion with a bartender revealed the tragic human effect of the dam: “This bartender Willie told me that his grandmother would rather be drowned by the impending flood than have to leave her ancestral home.” The human cost of a project that will raise the level of the third longest river in the world by more than 175 metres is evidenced in the two million people being displaced, and dozens of towns, villages, and cultural sites being inundated.

Rather than focussing on the macro implications—like documenting the billions of tonnes of concrete being poured—Chang drilled down to an individual level, using the luxury riverboats as a microcosm of Chinese society, “the context of this film is that it was exploring the human experience, the human story of those affected by the relocation process, and essentially, the effects of modernisation. I wanted the story to be told through the eyes and voices and faces and experiences and human lives of those subjects”.

Sitting in on the ‘auditioning’ process used by the boat’s executive officer, Chang watched “an almost natural casting process, where I could be there next to the managers as they hired new employees.” He soon recognised two powerful characters: sixteen-year-old Shui Yu (Cindy), eldest daughter of a peasant family perched on the edge of the Yangzte in a house that has to be moved to higher ground annually with the seasonal flooding of the river; and Bo Yo Chen (Jerry), the only son of a middle-class family. Both teenagers have been pressed into working on the boats, when further study is their true goal.

The pair could not be more different. Chang confesses that on seeing Jerry’s self-centred, arrogant persona, “I thought he was Western when I first met him, that he was raised in America.” The younger Shui Yu is more a victim of circumstance, “There is a kind of built-in responsibility as the first-born to take care of the family. And Cindy is a woman, and the eldest, and she has a younger brother. Effectively, a lot of her dreams are cut out, and she has to focus back on the family, and her brother especially.”

The beautiful, often surreal result of Chang’s journey with Shui Yu and Bo Yo Chen is alternately humorous, poignant, and fascinating, “this can be a very polarising film … some people thought it was a pro-China film … some thought it was anti-China.” At the same time, Chang moved beyond the role of a journalist: “it was very important that the subjects knew that I wasn’t just going to walk away at the end of the production … Even to this day, I’m still in touch with the families; everyone has seen the film. We started a charity to help the family, especially the Yu family – that was a very important position to put myself into.”

For more information about the film visit www.uptheyangtze.com

Be first to comment on this article

Write Comment
Comments are submitted for possible publication on the condition that they may be edited. Poster's IP addresses are logged.
Name:
Comment:
Code:*