The New Deal was FDR’s answer to the economic depression in this country. It included big public works projects that created our infrastructure as well as providing jobs to those who had lost everything in The Depression. It was workfare aimed at modernizing the country and helping its citizens. Despite the fact that time has shown large hydroelectric dam projects to be more harmful to the environment than previously understood, developing nations still use them for the same reasons we did 60 years ago. Such is the case in China today upon their great river, the Yangtze. In Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang’s Sundance World Documentary Competition film, the locks that allow ships to pass through the dam on the River also serve as a kind of time portal, taking us to a moment in time when a nation is moving itself, and hopefully its citizens, forward. Signs dot the countryside showing to where the water will eventually rise. They are the markers of progress.

In stunning cinematography and romantic pacing (understandable that Zeitgeist has signed on to distribute), the film captures the story of a family being forced from their sustenance existence into a modern one for which they are unprepared. Modern means an end to living off the land, which is today equated to poverty, even if the people living that way feel they are better off with the ability to grow their own food and get their water free from the river. Modernization means electricity, water delivered through pipes and vegetables bought at the market.

The filmmaker captures a slow disconnection from nature, as the old stories hold less meaning now. But even as these things fall away, they are replaced with new culture. Chinese people are learning English to communicate with Westerners who venture out on river cruises. They seek old world China and the film illustrates those moments of East meeting West that can be awkward, funny, inspiring and sometimes sad. The film is not without romanticism but it also shows this transition in its complexity, and gives us a window into an experience that generations of Americans prior to us experienced but is rare here now.

If you saw Franny Armstrong’s Drowned Out, a similar story that happened in India, you are aware of the building blocks of this story. But what is fresh about Up the Yangtze is that it captures this moment of dramatic change in China, a place in the world of particular interest these days, but it also allows us to ruminate on larger issues of globalization and class without ever using those words.

indeWIRE interview with director Yung Chang

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