I just got home from seeing Lixin Fan's Last Train Home, which follows one family among the 130 million migrant factory workers in China. It's a powerful film which manages to capture something of the broad sweep of humanity and the intimate struggles of this one family. It did seem a bit contrived at times, but I recognize the challenges of filming in China and certainly forgive the filmmakers for doing what they did to knit together their story.
The film was showing at the Brattle Theatre as the last of this season's Docyard screenings, which help build our Boston documentary filmmaking community. After the screening, the filmmaker skyped in for a Q&A (pictured above).
It was great reconnecting with old friends, including Jesse Shapins, a PhD student at the Harvard Graduate Student of Design who is also an urban media theorist, documentary artist, and social entrepreneur. When I worked at Harvard's Film Study Center last year, we helped Jesse and his classmate Olga Touloumi curate A Media Archaeology of Boston - which pulled together media representations of the Boston area landscape over the last 100+ years. Thanks to all their effort, it was a great show - ranging from stuttery 1901 movies of Boston streetcars, to cheesy 1980s fiction films, to a black-and-white documentary on the Boston Marathon and a promotional video featuring the mayor of Somerville jogging through the city streets.
Jesse has just started co-teaching A Media Archaeology of Place, which looks to be a fascinating course "exploring different modes of representing place." I'm looking forward to seeing the final output of this class, which will be accessible to the public on a map-based website.