A documentary by Lixin Fan. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, March 5, at the Ridge Theatre

Subsistence living used to mean families working small plots of land to feed themselves, with enough left over to barter for other necessities. Lately, however, it means doing even more tedious work in drafty factories under fluorescent lights for people who don’t care if they ever see you again.

As documented in the powerful Last Train Home, 130 million Chinese now drift across their gigantic country for seasonal jobs that separate them from loved ones. And some are not quite sure they even have any loved ones left.

That’s the case with Suqin Chen and Changhua Zhang, a careworn couple from a lush part of Sichuan province. Like millions of others, seen in sometimes riotous masses at train stations and in ticket lineups, the two only return home for the New Year’s break.

Director Lixin Fan, doing his own, often beautiful, cinematography, wisely follows this singular situation, with once-proud parents now barely conversant with the two kids they left with grandma to raise. Unfortunately, teenage daughter Qin sees no advantage to her countryside school and decides to drop out and earn quick coin like her parents—leading to a confrontation as intense as any in a fictional drama.

Along its circuitous path, the film suggests an irreparable breakdown in China’s identity as a peasant-rooted, family-centred society, with the drive to export mass-produced crap overwhelming all other values. With demand for jeans and toys slowing at the decade’s end, subsistence takes on even more desperate meaning, as glimpsed here in the bewildered stares of lost souls riding the rails to nowhere.