A Quiet Ride on the Last Train Home (2009)

Today's post is coming earlier than usual. I'm busy tonight at a concert, so I had to watch this as soon as midnight hit. Last Train Home is a documentary of sorts detailing what it calls "the largest Human migration". Every year for the New Year, millions of Chinese migrant workers travel home for just a few days to visit their families before heading back. They only see their family once a year, and they struggle in factories making products for us. On a more human level, however, Last Train Home specifically follows one group of family members for 3 years and documents what they go through and the difficulties it causes them directly. You'll find my thoughts on the film right after the jump.


In my day to day life, I only live a few hours away from my family. The situation that the family in this movie lives in seems unbearable. The mother and father, who we follow the most throughout the movie, originally left their farmland home for the big city and factory life when their first child was only 1 year old. The grandparents raised the children while the parents were gone.

Only being able to see your parents and your own children once a year for a few short days, for years on end, is something I just can't imagine. The strain clearly takes it's toll, as we see a massive disconnect between the parents and the children immediately. The only things the parents can think to say to them is to constantly tell them to do better in school. Schooling is vitally important, because if you fail or drop out, your only choice is to live the life the parents have.

Speaking of the trip, this is not a small undertaking. Train tickets are hard to come by due to the thousands and thousands of people at any given station. There's also the issue that sheer number of people in one place can cause. Endless seas of pushing bodies press against each other. Some people wait for days in these conditions, just trying to get on the trains. It takes the family in the movie nearly a full day just to get on a train at one point, and it's mentioned early on that the full trip takes them 2 days to complete. The trains are cramped, hot and little room to store your things. And yet they make the trip every year.

The film shows many personal moments of the family, including an extremely heated argument towards the end of the film which I actually found quite shocking. Seeing the conditions they live in, work in, and travel in is quite eye opening for what day to day life is like in another part of the world. Quite interesting, but also very slowly paced for the majority of the movie. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes documentaries in particular, but be warned about the slow quiet progression of the film. Nevertheless, I can't deny the overall quality of the film. Quite good.