If “The Last Train Home” is reminiscent of “Up the Yangtze,” another film about the social upheavals following the wake of China’s economic transformation, that’s because director Lixin Fan worked as associate producer, sound recordist and translator on that film. Now stepping into the director’s shoes, Lixin brings us a story of the New Year’s Holiday migration in China, where 120 million workers get time off to return home to their families.
The scene, as we see at the beginning, is chaos, like something out of a disaster movie, with crowd upon crowd trying to get a ticket, cramming onto trains, and heading back into the countryside. Some wait so long to get a ticket and live so far away that if they ever reach their destination it’s time to go back.