Up the Yangtze

With a box office total of over $1 million (US/Canada) and still growing, UP THE YANGTZE has stunned audiences across the country with its singularly moving and visually striking portrait of a country in dramatic flux. China's Yangtze river and all of the life that surrounds it is undergoing a truly astonishing transformation wrought by the largest hydroelectric project in history, the Three Gorges Dam. Canadian documentary filmmaker Yung Chang returns to the gorgeous, now-disappearing landscape of his grandfather's youth to trace the surreal life of a farewell cruise that traverses the gargantuan waterway. With touching humanism and wry wit, Chang follows the microcosmic society of the luxury liner and the bitter irony of a young girl sent to work as a dishwasher aboard the ship, trying to provide for her peasant family as the river's floodwaters drive them from their home. UP THE YANGTZE gives a human dimension to the wrenching changes facing not only an increasingly globalized China, but the world at large.