Up The Yangtze!

For the festival's doco strand, it's again with the high quality and again with the tearjerking emotional factors as Up The Yangtze! (exclamation mark built in to the title, ala Mamma Mia!) takes/took to the screen this afternoon at Dendy Opera Quays.

The introduction of dams and the hydro-electric scheme to China's famous river meant the enforced displacement of great numbers of farmers, peasants and their families. Yangtze looks at how this situation affects one family who eke out their living right on the bank, and follows the progress of their daughter Shui Yu when she takes up work on a tourist boat on the river. The film also keeps watch over a cocky young man from a much wealthier family, Bo Yu Chen, who joins the boat's hospitality crew at the same time as Shui Yu.

There's an incredible amount to be learnt from this film about the nuances of modern Chinese culture, and the impersonal-seeming forces within it which bulldoze the entire population future-ward, even as the situation of the poorest citizens remains completely ignored. For the featured family, this means that even though they helped build the banks of the soon to be flooded river, they have to carry all of their furniture and belongings up that bank on their own backs when it's relocation time. The scenes of the rising water ebbing over their old home, finally timelapsed into complete submergence, wrench at the heartstrings. A poetic shot of lights winking into view at night along the newly built canal is similarly powerful cinema.

The daughter's adventures on the boat and her prospects for various kinds of improvement are the most inspiring element of the film, though they also show up the weakest area, which is the portrayal of rich kid Bo Yu Chen. His family are conspicuously absent from the film, which hurts his story, and when things don't work out for him on the boat, it's not specifically apparent from the footage why that is. This contrasts strongly with the almost too-assured delivery of everything else. I've seen very few documentaries where the filmmakers seemed to have as much feature-like coverage of various angles, shot sizes, subjects, etc. as they do in this one. The explanation could be brilliant direction, multiple cameras, luck, great foresight, or the asking the subjects to repeat certain actions or wait until the camera was appropriately located before carrying them out. Or perhaps a bit of all of the above; I can't know as a viewer. Because of Yangtze's greater than average veneer of beauty and transparency, it made me consider anew the nature of documentary. What do we expect from the genre? What rules do we apply to it concerning its relationship to reality, and how just or unjust are they in different contexts?

So I don't think Up The Yangtze! is 'perfect filmmaking', as someone at IMDB described it, but I think it is an excellent documentary, showing you much that you'd never see or learn of otherwise, with honest emotions and a poetic eye for the bigger picture.