Watch Up the Yangtze For Free

Crappy film

Absolutely Fantastic

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Chinese Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang joins a cruise up the Yangtze River carrying Canadian tourists. The river settlements are set to be flooded by The Three Gorges Dam. The tour shows the orderly move but the film also shows some of the locals struggling. Along with the ghost cities, the Yu family is about to be flooded from the river shore where they squeeze out a living growing food. The daughter Yu Shui wants to continue her education but the family has no money. She gets a job on the cruise and given the English name Cindy. She suffers home sickness. Another new worker Chen Bo Yu is given the name Jerry. He's a higher placed peasant who sees the cruise as a cash cow. The two new workers strike different paths culminating in a surprise ending.This is a nice slice of life. The best thing that a documentary like this can do is to bring a different world to the audience. It shows our common humanity while keeping the individual personal stories. The two young people are very compelling and their changing world is fascinating. This is a movie at a personal level against a backdrop of an important time of change in China.

The Three Gorges Dam is one of the most impressive architectural projects of this decade. I've never been to China, so I've been forced to appeal to various Western resources about it. All sorts of environmentalist critiques are available, even from such mundane places as youtube. Those of that viewpoint lament the loss of habit for the Chinese river dolphin and other typical claims. This view doesn't require much thoughtfulness to reach and ignores China's economic struggle for modernization. The libertarian viewpoint harshly condemns forced relocation of millions of peasants. I find the latter an issue irrelevant to those living in community-centric China. The business manager (of my university organization) is a Chinese citizen and once told me that her people "conform," for lack of a better word, to what others expect of them. She cannot wear a tank top in public because everyone will stare questioningly at her. So, from her stories, and my own off and on research, I wanted to learn about Chinese citizens' reaction to Three Gorges Dam. I didn't think it would bother people in the way Westerners claim. I never expected to find such an illuminating answer so quickly. It's like how I felt the first time I watched Batman Begins.Most residents, by the time Up the Yangtze was filmed, had already relocated. The project was completed October 30, 2008, so no one still lives along riverside like previously. Director Yung Chang, also narrator, tells us how he realized a while ago that old China is dead. What people see in their mind's eye, as they board river cruise boats, is China as depicted in Hong Kong martial arts movies and wuxia pictures. The Yangtze project is complete and China is modernizing. You can still travel luxuriously; getting service from young people like those shown in this movie, but you won't see what you want. China itself isn't sure of its future. One man interviewed says that he isn't sure if China is capitalist or communist now. As long as society progresses forward, its path is unimportant. A black cat or a white cat is fine, as long as it can kill mice.Most of the story follows a single impoverished family who lives in a hut beside Yangtze. They send their daughter to wait tables on a tour boat. Yu Shui doesn't adjust well to her new robotic life as maid. Other children don't either. Middle class kids are on board to advance themselves, while Yu Shui is on board to survive. Mr. Chang suggests that China's one child policy permits parents to mollify their male children. While what we see indicates this, I found similar effect in young women. While they were harder workers, they were more withdrawn. Everyone on that boat has to be from a small family, so they're sense of family community must be incredibly strong. Perhaps China's one child policy may have larger negative effect on human capital than it has positive environmental impact.When we aren't on deck, Chang shows us various clips of Chinese urbanization. Government officials show dumb Westerners new housing projects, built to accommodate relocated persons, and acknowledge that everyone residing there is "happy." Of course people are happy; they are still alive. Chang's documentary can be summarized by my preceding statement. It's like The Grapes of Wrath or Doctor Zhivago. The characters in both those books (and films) experience tremendous hardship. When your family is tossed around, all you care about is keeping it intact. Chang does show us that older, single people do feel nostalgic regret at having to leave their ancestral homes. Even then, they aren't rallying against their government.Up the Yangtze is too limited to be the authoritative "Three Gorges Dam" documentary. By following Yu Shui's family, Chang shows us what we could probably have deduced from reading an amateur film review. I hope his next project will be more inclusive of all people affected by "an issue." A documentary about middle class people living in Shanghai would be unique but not inspiring.

Perhaps I am the dam, as I was unmoved by this film. The promotional material I received prior to the showing of the film had prepared me to see a story about a huge dam project, with serious environmental and human consequences. So I was disappointed that the dam itself was not a major feature of the film, and no environmental issues were raised. But I can't really fault the film itself for the people who promote it, so I'll try to leave that aside. I was impressed with the access that the filmmakers had to get frank comments from a variety of people in the film, and for me that was something new that I enjoyed for a film from China. But still I found it to be a slow film of two kids who are sent by their families to work serving foreign tourists on a river tour boat, and the difficulties that first-time jobs, especially away from home, can bring to anyone. It was also about a very poor family having to move from their shack to a more densely-populated place where they will need to learn a different way of living. In both cases, I found that I was admiring people's ability to find ways to move forward, but I felt that the movie wanted me to believe that this was bad. Some scenes appeared to be included randomly, as they did not fit in with the rest of the film, such as the creepy stop-motion dancing kid, or the praying woman. On the flip side, the story of the two kids working on the boat seems to just stop without explanation after something significant happens to one. I wanted to know more about what happened to each of them. That it was in China, or on the Yangtze, seemed insignificant to the story itself. I don't feel that I know much more about life on the Yangtze, or the Three Gorges Dam, than before I saw the film. Seeing that a documentary of this type can be made in China, I feel this subject is therefore still ripe for someone else to make a more informative documentary about the Yangtze and/or the Dam.

I would consider this to be a perfect documentary for its technique and narration.The movie's account of the massive three-gorges project is quite detailed. But without letting viewers loose attention to its subject, the movie takes us through the history of China, the paradoxes of its "modern" path of development and even the myths and goddesses associated with the river. The movie aptly exposes and questions the "tourist" nature of our own interests in the vast orient unveiled to us. The satire in the film (which may not be all non-fictional) is sharp and quite funny. Overall, the story telling is so fluid that it may feel to be a fictional account altogether.Like any other documentary this is a movie replete with the accounts of lives of the people associated with the project. However this movie accomplishes much more by reevaluating our own ideas of economic development; by showing us the two sides of it – fulfillment of a dream of progress and loss of an environment that constitutes the being.Lastly, owing not just to the country of landscapic beauty that china is, there are some captivating shots in the movie that stay in memory long after the movie is over.