Up the Yangtze

Synopsis

China's Three Dams Project is the largest engineering scheme in the world. But in attempting to harness the power of the Yangtze River, two million people have been displaced and entire culture lost under water. Yung Chan's unsettling film focuses on Yu Shui, who is employed as a tour guide on a ship that offers foreign tourists a glimpse of world – and her homeland – before it is lost forever.

Moving between alien environment Yu Shui encounters on the ship – whose opulence contrasts starkly with the poverty on land – and the struggle her family has to face in finding a new home above the rising waters, Yung Chan captures the negative forces at work behind the façade of social progress, where corruption is rife and the struggle to survive is increasingly hard. At the same time, the film questions the forces of prgress, both in the speed of change and it necessity. And by their absence, the film ponders on who is benefitting from such change.

The vanishing world Yung Chang captures is a rich and verdant landscape, one that has rarely been presented with such lyricism and beauty. And yet, with its account of mass migration, the imagery is bittersweet, which only makes UP THE YANGTZE more poignant..

“Yung has found, in the Yangtze, a brilliant natural metaphor for upward mobility in modern China: Whether they hail from the lowlands or the urban centers, everyone here is scrambling to reach higher ground. ” — – Scott Founda, the Village Voice