UP THE YANGTZE

Thursday, April 24 @ 7:30pm

 

In Person:

Director Yung Chang

 

 

 

Members $9 / Public $12  Includes Reception /  No Refunds

Tickets can also be purchased at the box office during theatre hours

or by calling Brown Paper Tickets toll free at 1-800-838-3006.

 

Up The Yangtze is a quietly powerful testament about how the Chinese government’s adoption of capitalist mass production techniques, while continuing to profess socialist ideals, is creating massive technological projects with side effects that ride roughshod over people’s lives. China, hungry for electrical power to drive their expanding economy, undertook in the 1990s a gargantuan engineering project to dam up the Yangtze River. Keep in mind that after the Nile, and the Amazon, the Yangtze is the world’s third longest river. On its continent-long path it drains lakes and rivers en route to its outlet in the East China Sea. Alas the area along the river bank flooded by the dam was home to over one million people. They drew their sustenance from farming the fertile earth of the river bank and harvesting its fish. Yung Chang’s brilliant Up the Yangtze focuses on the Yu family as they watch the dam waters slowly rise towards the point that will engulf their home, and their small farm. The hand-built shack houses three children and their parents. Dad, who can’t read or write, ekes out a living as a dockworker. Mom takes care of everything else. The film follows the fate of their eldest child, 16-year-old Cindy Yu Shui, who desperately wants to change her life by going to high school. Her parents press her to get a job to help support the family. She gets a job on one of the luxurious sightseeing river ferries that travel the Yangtze. Cindy works in the kitchen, waits tables, and listens to the tourists extol the wonders of the Yangtze dam. With biting vision, this film measures the price of the globalization process Chinese style. - Vic Skolnick, CAC Co-director    Canada, 2007, 93 min.   

Click HERE for official website.

Click HERE give money to help the Yu Family.