The Last Train Home

Lixin Fan's powerful documentary, Last Train Home (2009), chronicles the devastating effects of capitalism on one family's experience as migrant workers. A husband and wife have left their small village to work in textile factories to help support their family. This began when their first child, a daughter, was only one. She and her younger brother were left with their grandparents to be raised as the couple only return once a year during Chinese New Year, something that the film tell us that 135 million migrant workers do every year and try to parent by phone. This has created resentment, especially from the older daughter who thinks her parents only care about money. In the course of the making of this film, she quits school before graduating in order to work. She accompanies her family home during Chinese New Year after quitting her factory job, only to return to another city to work in a night club and have some fun. While at home their is a big fight between the daughter and her father as she disrespects him and is beaten. The scenes of the yearly migration look extremely aggravating and uncomfortable. Life working long shifts in a textile factory doesn't look like much fun either. Their greatest hope is that their son will be spared that existence, and will escape that life through education.