Hacker Cinema
Last Train Home
归途列车
2009 · Film · documentary · 85 min
Directed by Lixin Fan
A family embarks on an annual tormenting journey along with 130 million other peasant workers to reunite with their distant family, and to revive their love and dignity as China soars as the world's next super power.
8 positive1 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
I highly recommend the documentary Last Train Home. It follows a Chinese family - the parents leave their children in their rural village to go off in search of work. They make the annual trip back to see them for Chinese New Year.
The film captures the awesome scale of the migration and its cultural importance, as well as the social impact of China's urbanization. It's really devastating.
Last Train Home: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1512201/
There's a good documentary that covers this migration - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Train_Home_(film)
If ppl are interested more in this topic, Last train home is a good documentary to look at.
It's a difficult question, I've thought quite a bit about it.
Begging has increased massively in my city over the past few years (common in most of northern Europe)[1][2].
Some thoughts on this (totally understand if people disagree, it's a difficult topic):
- These people are obviously poor and miserable. Feeling sorry for them is a natural and human thing.
- But, if everyone were begging all humans would starve to death. It's not scalable.
- There are ~1 billion people on less than $1 a day (even with PPP adjustment that's probably less than most beggars make).
- Begging is sort of a 'squeaky wheel gets the grease' allocation method. It's likely that there is someone else that would need the money more.
- It feels like a bad thing to incentivize.
- These people have harsh lives, and often they've started with unfavorable odds. But I think it's more useful to focus aid/effort on structural issues, like fighting corruption, improving world trade, good institutions, education, etc (in both developed and developing countries).
- Human civilization as it stands today is a product of long, hard struggle. Most people have lived grim lives.
- Mostly an anecdote, but I watched a movie called 'Last Train Home'[3], about a Chinese family that works 12+ hours a day, 51 weeks per year. They saw their kids 1 week per year. That's quite the struggle. I'd guess most people watching the movie would feel that these parents lived a harder life than many people begging in rich western cities.
I'm not arguing these are in any way optimal (or even good choices), but things I've donated to are Transparency International, Amnesty and Wikipedia.
[1] http://www.newsweek.com/half-swedes-want-ban-begging-319327
[2] http://www.newsweek.com/influx-roma-norway-leads-begging-ban-bill-304727
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Train_Home_(film)
For those that have netflix streaming http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/Last-Train-Home/70129380
For a very good look at life in these cities for workers see Last Train Home, a superb, emotionally-tense documentary following a Chinese family from a farming community as they move to the city for work in a clothing factory (without making any statement about conditions). I found it a really accessible and poignant film to understand a little better the Chinese drive towards personal independence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Train_Home_(film)
---China:
Last Train Home http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512201/
Up The Yangtze http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1114277/
Discovery Channel - The People's Republic of Capitalism - 4 parts series
China Rises, 4 parts CBC series
---Megacities:
Megacities http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169024/
BBC Megacities, BBC 3 parts series
---War:
Fog of War: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/
Restrepo: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1559549/
* Life is beautiful
* Last Train Home
* Brokeback mountain
* Slumdog Millionare
* Aftershocks (Tangshan dadizhen)
* Bus 174
* Moon
* The Wire (TV series)
* Zorba the greek
* City of God