Who made your blue jeans?: An incredible documentary, Last Train Home

Last Train Home (2009) is Lixin Fan's excellent documentary about migrant workers in China - after a great opening shot of a vast crowd of workers pressing against a set of gates waiting to board trains - and we know there's no way that anyone can handle a crowd - Fan gives us a surtext stating that 130 million Chinese migrant workers go home for the New Year, the largest population migration on the planet. Amazingly, he finds one family to focus on to tell this sorrowful story, and he does a great job; in the style of many contemporary documentaries he stays completely out of the picture, we never hear his voice or anyone's doing interviews and after the opening segment we never get a bit of info from the filmmaker, it's all what we see, carefully edited to have the feeling of an epic drama. Events take place over 3 years - we see a husband and wife living in terrible poverty in a large sitting, making clothes for the U.S. market. Their children are in the Szechuan village, being raised by the grandmothers. We see some very painful calls home, in which it's clear the parents barely know the children; they go home - incredibly difficult and expensive to get tickets - for the New Year, and we meet the children. The daughter, about 16, says no one her age is left in the village, either they've gone to the city to work or they're elderly. Parents awkwardly pressure the children to study hard - it's the only road out for the children of peasants, they note - but the daughter, Qin, wants to go to the city with them. She does so, lives with a girlfriend and others and has a crappy job, but makes a little money, starting to feel independent. Over the net two years, she gradually breaks away from the family, finally coming to head in a tremendous fight that Fan captures. It's the only moment when the frame breaks for a second, so to speak, as Qin turns to him and says: You wanted to film the real me? this is the real me! (Earlier, she and her brother had been very awkward, obviously looking at the camera when being filmed.) At the end, the mother decides she has to go back to live in the village, and the husband, by this time in ill health, is alone in the city, knowing the family is completely dependent on his pathetic wages - and as we also all know, the family is just a concept, they barely know one another. Goddamn, makes you think you should never wear another pair of $200 jeans, basically made in China by slave labor.