Up the Yangtze

Up the Yangtze offers a cinematically breathtaking look at the massive Three Gorges Dam—the biggest engineering project China has undertaken since the Great Wall—and the historical landscape it will change forever.

The film takes place primarily aboard a luxury ship that carries wealthy foreigners on a "farewell cruise" up China’s famed Yangtze River. With a humanist gaze and wry wit, director Yung Chang uses an Upstairs, Downstairs approach to study the cruise ship’s microcosmic society, as a means to give a human dimension to the wrenching changes facing an increasingly globalized China (and world). (93 mins., 35mm)

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