The Superb ‘Last Train Home’ Premieres on POV on 27 September at 10pm

“When we are home, we won’t even know what to say to the kids.” As Chen Suqin imagines the holiday visit she and her husband Zhang Changhua will make in a few days, she’s hardly happy. Some 16 years ago, the couple left Huilong Village, Sichuan Province to find work in the city. As they head home, along with some 130 million other migrant workers during the Chinese New Year, they ponder their decision. “We were very poor when we left,” Suqin remembers. “My mother held our baby when I left. Qin was only one year old. I was crying when I left.”

Now Qin is a teenager, confused and resentful: when her parents return, she doesn’t know how to act, for them or the film crew they bring with them. Lixin Fan’s extraordinary documentary, premiering on PBS’ POV series on 27 September, makes clear the many factors affecting the family, exposing the complications of their past as well as their performances for the camera. The film shows differences between country and city, youth and middle age, as well as the ways that Qin and her younger brother respond to their abandonment. When Qin decides to leave school and seek “freedom” in a factory job much like her parents’, they feel betrayed but can hardly say anything. All of them perform their frustration and pain for the camera, in scenes that seem both candid and self-conscious. The film exposes its own part in these performances, as family members go in different directions. But there are other costs too. You’re left to contemplate Qin’s new job serving drinks in a bar (where she is instructed, “The customer is always right”) as well as her parents’ return to their sewing machines. You’re also thinking about what it means that this has been observed and recorded, creating layers of audiences, at the time and ever after. These effects remain unseen here.

See PopMatters‘ review.