In the winter of 2006, the southern Chinese railway system was paralyzed by a snowstorm, with 60,000 people stuck at the Guangzhou train station. Montreal-based director Lixin Fan calls what he saw a “war zone”.

On the line from Toronto, Fan explains that he was trying to follow one family travelling during the annual migration of 130 million factory workers heading home for the Lunar New Year for his documentary Last Train Home, which opens in Vancouver on Friday (March 5). But his film crew was swept away in, as he puts it, a “big torrent of humanity”.

“At one point, the cameraman was lifted and carried away by the crowd, and the soundman was carried away to another direction,” Fan says.

What drove this seething mass to endure trying conditions, including standing on their feet for days without sleep? It was the aching desire to return to their rural homes and families, including their own children, whom they had forsaken to find work in the city.

Fan, a former China Central Television journalist who immigrated to Canada in 2006 and who also worked on Yung Chang’s 2007 NFB documentary, Up the Yangtze, says that although leaving the family goes against traditional Chinese ideals, the people do retain core principles. “They sacrifice themselves greatly or entirely in order to give their children a better life.”

On a research trip to the factory city of Guangzhou to find subjects for his film, Fan found what he was looking for in the Zhang family: two parents who left their daughter and son with grandparents on their farm when they left for the city. “The mother told me that she has been away to work for the past 16 years, and she only gets to spend less than a year [total] with her daughter. That was a heartbreaking fact to me.”

Although the family was reluctant to participate at first, he eventually became their confidant.

Those close bonds, however, cast him into a filmmaking dilemma when simmering tensions between the teenage daughter and the father erupted. “Should I stop my camera and go in and interfere, or should I stay objective? But I figured that I should look at the greater good, that I’m making this film for the entire migrant-worker group. But at the same time, I don’t want to hurt this family.” Eventually, Fan stepped in when things spun out of control.

His desire to expose the social, psychological, and emotional toll on these workers took on another dimension after he’d seen things from outside his home country. “I realize the things that are happening in China really have a very close tie with the rest of the world”¦.Also here, the kind of lifestyle that we are living is also based on, I think, the sacrifices that the workers are making in the developing countries, not just China.”

Fan is equally selfless in his objectives. “I wanted the world to know what they had been sacrificing.”

Lixin Fan will speak about his film at screenings at the Ridge Theatre on Friday and Saturday (March 5 and 6).