Der letzte Zug

Last Train Home (Chinese: 归途列车 ) is a 2009 Canadian documentary film directed by Lixin Fan and produced by Daniel Cross and Mila Aung-Thwin of EyeSteelFilm. It won the Best Documentary Feature at 2009 IDFA and has been distributed by Zeitgeist Films in the US.

Every spring, China's 130 million migrant workers travel back to their home villages for the Chinese New Year's holidays. This exodus called Chunyun is the world's largest human migration.

Working over several years, director Lixin Fan traveled with one couple who has embarked on these annual treks for almost two decades. Like many of China's rural poor, the Zhangs left their native village of Huilong, Daan Town [zh] , Guang'an District in Sichuan province and their newborn daughter to find work in Guangzhou in a garment factory for 16 years and see her only once a year during the Spring Festival. Their daughter Qin, now a restless and rebellious teenager, resents her parents' absence and longs for her own freedom away from school and her rural hometown, much to the dismay of her parents. She eventually leaves school, against the wishes of her parents, to work in the city.

In a March 2010 follow-up interview, director Lixin Fan reveals that the Zhangs are still working in the factory and Qin telephoned, but did not visit, for the New Year.[ 1]

In September 2011, Fan said that Qin was now a vocational student in Beijing, and that while Qin's mother is back on the farm, her father still works at the factory.[ 2]

In January 2012, an update on the family was released:

The film won the Genie Award for Best Feature Length Documentary at the 31st Genie Awards in 2011.[ 5]

Last Train Home has an 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, earning the Golden Tomato award for best limited-release and best foreign film.[ 6]

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times picked Last Train Home as one of the most outstanding works from the 2010 Sundance by characterizing it as "a beautifully shot, haunting and haunted large scale portrait".[ 7]

Film critic Roger Ebert praised its depiction of conflict in one family as they struggle to improve their quality of life; giving the film four out of four. He concluded that due to the film's depiction of the effects of capitalism on the country that "[t]he rulers of China may someday regret that they distributed the works of Marx so generously".[ 8]

Praising Last Train Home as "a documentary masterpiece", Brian Brooks of IndieWIRE wrote that "filmmaker Lixin Fan may very well be one of modern-day China's great non-fiction storytellers."[ 9]

Critics of IndieWIRE placed Last Train Home at "top four" in its list of Top Ten Competition Films of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.[ 10]

Last Train Home was one of the top five films nominated for the Directors Guild of America Documentary Prize, announced on January 29, 2011, at the 63rd annual DGA Awards Dinner.[ 11] It lost to Charles Ferguson's "Inside Job."

Lixin Fan was interviewed by Anna Maria Tremonti, host of CBC radio program "The Current", on January 19, 2011, talking about Last Train Home.[ 12]

Last Train Home was released on American screens on September 3, 2010.