Synopsis for the Film

Two lonely humans against an epic landscape. Two melancholy figures among the massive Three Gorges Dam- the largest hydroelectric project in the world, the dream of the founder-fathers- Sun Yat-sen, Chaing Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, the greatest engineering feat since the Great Wall, the monument of Chinese progress. Underneath their feet flows the mighty river Yangtze now turned by the dam into a cold silent beast gradually swallowing up a valley once revered for its awe-inspiring scenery. Let alone the poor humans, even the mountains have been dwarfed. 16 year old Yu Shui, with her family’s livelihood and home being drowned in the ever rising river is now ironically employed on a luxury tourist boat guiding tourists on a ‘farewell to Three Gorges tour’. Her co-worker is the similarly resigned and disorientated Chen Bo-Yu. Among so much upheaval and apathy, our lost protagonists struggle to find themselves as they move ‘Up the Yangtze’, but what are two misplaced existences in a river of so much misery and paradoxically, ‘progress’. Like a postcard of lost memories, Director Yung Chang’s subtle poetic explorations of existences erased and lost, of progress and displacement, of history, the present and the future is under its epic scope, a heartbreakingly intimate and humane cinematic experience.

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