Movies Features

Quebec-based filmmaker Yung Chang had just come home from Park City, Utah, still overwhelmed by the rapturous response of audiences at the Sundance Film Festival to his first feature, Up the Yangtze, when the Georgia Straight caught up with him.

The stylish National Film Board production, which opens here on Friday (February 15), follows a large tourist vessel on its journey toward the fabled Three Gorges Dam project, featuring what will likely be the biggest, most environmentally threatening dam ever built. Chang’s journey began back in 2002, on a cruise similar to the one seen here serenely moving upriver.

“I found the ship to be a remarkable microcosm, which also contained this kind of upstairs-downstairs elements, where classes and cultures meet,” he said in a follow-up to some quick chats when the film debuted at last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival. Here it was judged to be the fest’s best documentary for its provocatively meditative view of an island of humanity floating silently through lands soon to be submerged and populated by western tourists and carefully ingratiating Chinese. (It was also up for a grand jury prize at Sundance.)

“It’s kind of a bilingual Gosford Park, and also a whole country compacted into one space, with the Chinese below decks trying to climb up and join the westerners. Plus, we’re on the Yangtze, which is considered the lifeline of China, the centre from which it came.”

Chang himself has quite a few cultures compacted into a lanky, easygoing, and very hard-working space.

Born in Oshawa, Ontario, to Chinese immigrants, he moved to Quebec as a child and attained a filmmaking degree from Concordia University (where he was also known as Jason Chang). He then studied acting at Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City.

Content and personal history aside, the 30-year-old Canadian is still in awe of the shoulders he rubbed up against at Sundance.

“It’s a weird feeling to have a sold-out screening and…see Quentin Tarantino and Isabella Rossellini in your audience. I also ran into Neil Young, which is cool, because I’ve always loved Neil Young.”

Yung missed a small show the older Young put on, to accompany his CSNY film, but he did manage to attend a private soiree with music provided by Patti Smith, who also had a doc in the fest.

“Because both our films are going to eventually show on PBS, I got to have brunch with Patti Smith,” he recalled with a chuckle. “Then there was Michel Gondry playing piano while Mos Def performed songs from Be Kind Rewind. I was half expecting to be asked to go up and play the pipa or something. But that never happened.”

In the end, the filmmaker walked away slightly puzzled by the Sundance experience.

“The audiences are great. But it’s a very, uh, liberalist environment, and some of the questions seemed a little strange. Like one person asked me who I was in the movie. Some people didn’t realize that it was a documentary….”

Thanks to Christopher Guest and, more locally, Calgary’s Gary Burns, audiences are almost waiting for a laugh track when they watch docs these days.

“I think Yangtze’s got a very strong narrative arc, and I guess people are used to the talking-heads type of thing; as soon as they see emotion, they think it’s some kind of constructed fiction.”

The rest of Chang’s year is pretty well spoken for, what with festival openings in Europe and Asia, as well as a commercial rollout across this nation. But he enjoys brief respites in Montreal between events. Israel, the U.K., and Hong Kong are next on the itinerary. Notably, China proper is not yet in the loop.

“China will be all right, I think, but I would have to make a few small changes in the film. There are a couple of comments here and there that wouldn’t make the cut, if you know what I mean. It has been seen in private screenings in China, mostly by filmmakers and producers, and the reaction has been warm. The issue is not taboo for them.”

Indeed, that dam project has become a major subject for the Chinese, both at home and abroad.

“It’s almost a subgenre of its own, as a matter of fact.” He calls Canada’s Manufactured Landscapes “the doomsday film”—and puts the Chinese–Hong Kong production Still Life at the other end of the spectrum for its melancholy perspective. (Bing Ai and Before the Flood are other recent docs with Three Gorges at their centre.)

“Embarking on a film about the Three Gorges, I was certainly inspired by every type of Asian cinema—especially Taiwanese New Wave.”

Aesthetically, he shares with Edward Yang (A One and a Two) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (Three Times) a love of long, languorous takes that favour physical beauty over dramatic content. But because Chang’s subjects are taken from unstaged life (still and otherwise), they take on a specific gravity that moves them away from pretension into the solid realm of lives, and places, as they are felt on a daily basis.

This poetic physicality is just as evident in the director’s previous effort, “Earth to Mouth”. A near-feature at 42 minutes, it follows the food-production cycle of a Chinese-vegetable farm in rural Ontario. That may sound like pretty dry stuff, but Chang centres on an elderly grandmother from China who works alongside migrant Mexican field workers. The film, which won its own awards back in 2003, is as spectacularly lush as it is thoughtful, compassionate, and self-assured.

These qualities are what sets Up the Yangtze apart from most advocacy docs these days, and Chang knows his subject matter in the newer film allowed him to work on a grand scale.

“Well, it is an epic landscape in which to work, and it seems to encapsulate just about every aspect of what is happening in contemporary China, metaphorically speaking.”

It’s actually bigger than that, since the social and environmental risks raised by flooding great swaths of ancient earth are joined by concerns about dragging isolated rural peoples into the instantly globalizing machinery of ecotourism.

“It’s such a symbol of modernization, but in an archaic, Hoover Dam way of thinking. But China is full of these monumental projects. The whole magnetic-railway thing, and big plans to redivert waters to Beijing. These are projects so big you can’t even grasp the scope of them. It came out in November that the dam may cause even more catastrophes, and that they may have to relocate another four million people. And, of course, they decided to build the world’s largest dam right on a fault line.”

The elements of risk and ceaseless change, in a way, actually contribute to a kind of marketable nostalgia attached to China’s most myth-laden region and its uncertain future.

“You know, Canada was asked to do a feasibility study for this project, and they advised against it in the end. But now that they’ve dug the hole, so to speak, for this project, there’s no way to stop it. So everyone becomes more invested in just keeping everything going.”

The filmmaker and his film are notably nonjudgmental about China’s intentions and its people. If his in-your-face approach is somewhat unsparing, the Mandarin-speaking director’s affection for all his on-screen subjects is self-evident.

“This thing only worked because I spent so much time with people before I even turned the camera on. I was over there for about six months before we started shooting. Then when people opened up, well, the whole crew was in tears…The hardest part, when it was over, was just like getting off that cruise ship five years ago: I didn’t want to say goodbye.”

Sure, but did Patti Smith feel the same way?