Up the Yangtze
| Up the Yangtze | |
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the film's poster
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| Directed by | Yung Chang |
| Produced by |
Mila Aung-Thwin Germaine Ying-Gee Wong John Christou |
| Written by | Yung Chang |
| Starring | Yu "Cindy" Shui Chen "Jerry" Bo Yu |
| Narrated by | Yung Chang |
| Music by | Olivier Alary |
| Cinematography | Wang Shi Qing |
| Edited by | Hannele Halm |
| Distributed by | Zeitgeist Films |
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Release date
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Running time
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93 minutes |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English and Mandarin |
Up the Yangtze is a 2007 documentary film directed by Chinese-Canadian director Yung Chang. The film focuses on people affected by the building of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze river in Hubei, China. The theme of the film is the transition towards consumer capitalism from a farming, peasant-based economy as China develops its rural areas. The film is a co-production between the National Film Board of Canada and Montreal's EyeSteelFilm with the participation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Geographic Channel, P.O.V., SODEC, and Telefilm. The film is being distributed in the USA by Zeitgeist Films. The United Kingdom distributor is Dogwoof Pictures.
The setting of the film is a riverboat cruise ship floating up the Yangtze river. Two young people are the focus of the film as they work aboard the ship. One is a sixteen-year-old girl from a particularly poor family living on the banks of the Yangtze near Fengdu, named "Cindy" Yu Shui. She is followed as she leaves her family to work on one of the cruise ships serving wealthy western tourists at the same time as her family is being forced from their home due to the flooding that accompanied the building of the dam. The film shows her acclimatization to the consumer economy of tourism as well as modern technology of the cruise ships, juxtaposed with her family and other older citizens who are displaced from a rural lifestyle to cities where they must pay for the vegetables they used to grow on their own.
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Wikipedia