Up the Yangtze

Director Yung Chang uses the construction of China's massive Three Gorges Dam as a springboard to better understanding the social hierarchies and changing times in his homeland in this documentary focusing on the luxury cruise ship that carries predominately Western tourists down the Yangtze River. ...more

Nothing suits a sociocultural documentary portrait of a nation more powerfully than the gestalt of sweeping, irreversible change reshaping and redefining the landscape to an immeasurable degree, while the cameras are rolling. Yung Chang's Canadian-produced documentary Up the Yangtze benefits from just such an element. An essay on geopolitical transition that could not possibly have been made at a riper or more advantageous moment in history, it also embodies an autumnal film of death and rebirth ...more