Up the Yangtze

[B] Documentary

• Directed by Yung Chang

China’s Three Gorges Dam may be the largest hydroelectric project ever attempted. Spanning the highly-populated Yangtze River basin, it has been in construction for many years, yet isn’t expected to be complete until 2011. As many as four million people may have to be relocated as the flood waters rise.

Yung Chang’s documentary takes an unusual but effective approach to examining how the dam is changing the Yangtze basin. He focuses his camera on the young people working a cruise ship that takes western tourists along the river on a “Farewell cruise”–your last chance to see the Yangtze is something like its natural form.

The tour guides try to put a happy face on the human upheaval, but they don’t always succeed. In one scene, American tourists are shown a wonderful, modern relocation apartment. One expresses a well-founded doubt that all dam refugees are so lucky.

Most of the film centers on two teenagers working the boat. The most likable of them, Yu Shui (using the American name Cindy for the benefit of the tourists) comes from a family of subsistence farmers living on the river’s shore. She has just finished middle school, but her family can’t afford to send her to high school (so much for Communism), so she goes to work on the ship. Not surprisingly, she deeply resents her job at first–she starts out as a dishwasher–but learns to appreciate the skills she’s picking up.

The film spends considerable time with Yu Shui’s family. Illiterate and dirt-poor, their way of life is threatened by the rising waters. For them, the transition to higher ground won’t be an easy one.

You won’t find Up the Yangtze‘s other “star,” Chen Bo (AKA Jerry), quite so sympathetic. Good-looking, comfortably middle-class, and completely self-confident, he thinks of little beyond himself. In one scene, bragging about his talent for collecting large tips, he tells the camera that he avoids helping the old and the infirm because they don’t tip as well as the middle-aged.

A more conventional documentary on the Three Gorges Dam would tell you more about the project–what’s involved and what it hopes to achieve. But Chang (a Canadian of Chinese decent) offers something more valuable–a view of the people whose lives will change because of it.

Up the Yangtze screened at the 2008 San Francisco International Film Festival.