"Up the Yangtze": Family cruise leads to exploration of human toll of Chinese development

Has China relaxed its censorship restrictions regarding Western documentaries during the past year?

Two Canadian-based nonfiction films, released one year apart, would seem to demonstrate a major sea change. Then again, the circumstances surrounding their creation may have been too different for comparisons to mean anything.

"We had to negotiate [with our minder] every time we turned the cameras on," said Jennifer Baichwal when she brought "Manufactured Landscapes" to the Seattle International Film Festival last year.

"I'm in a different position," said Yung Chang, the young Chinese-Canadian filmmaker behind "Up the Yangtze," which he brought to SIFF last month (it opens here for a regular run on Friday).

"Because I'm Chinese, I kind of melt into the environment, and I didn't have that sort of bureaucratic overseeing in making this movie. She's white, and she's working with a white crew, and I think she was on a more official level to photograph factories and such. For me, it was much more a story about a peasant family living on the banks of the river."

He acknowledges that both movies were inspired partly by the photographs of Edward Burtynsky, who finds unexpected beauty and artful patterns in what can appear to be intimidating piles of industrial waste.

"But the scope of the projects is somewhat different," said Yung. "[Baichwal's] looking through Western eyes at the implication of manufactured landscapes and the effect on the environment. Mine focuses more on that human side of the story. It was very important for me to show the human effects of progress."

"Up the Yangtze" began to come together six years ago, when its director, along with his parents and grandfather, landed on a tourist ship, part of a "farewell cruise" on the Yangtze River to the Three Gorges Dam project.

"That was just before they began the flooding," he said. "For me, that was a surreal experience, especially arriving in the city of Chongqing, the largest municipality in the world. It's equal to the population of Canada. It's huge, and at night the entire cityscape is lit up in neon lights.

"It looked like some kind of arcade game, like 'Blade Runner,' like a science-fiction film, and a cruise ship appeared out of nowhere and they started to play 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' (most of the tourists were American). That for me was the inspiration to make a film using this cruise ship as a microcosm."

The farewell cruises are no longer marketed that way, partly because the ships are now able to access areas Yung calls "mythical landscapes," immense gorges that have not been visible before.

"They scaled back from the sort of tragic 'catch it before it disappears' experience to calling it the Yangtze River cruise," he said. "The flooding hasn't reached its peak, which will be around 175 meters. I think it's hovering around 150 right now.

"The time-lapse scene in the film [which shows the gradual rise of the river] was shot in the fall of 2006. It took only six weeks for that flooding to take place."

Yung shot about 200 hours over the course of a year, "following many different story lines, different subtexts," some of which ended up on the cutting-room floor but may turn up on DVD.

"Around the world, there is a universality to this displacement because of 'man-made improvements,' " he said. "About 2 million people will be relocated in China. Megadam projects seem to create more social problems than benefits.

"The silts build up, and the efficiency is even being questioned. This dam is built on two major fault lines, and now there's even consideration that it may have contributed to the [recent] earthquake. In the future, people may be questioning what really caused it."

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com