Zeitgeist Acquires NFB’s Up the Yangtze

MONTREAL, January 18: The National Film Board of Canada
(NFB) announced that Zeitgeist Films has acquired Up the Yangtze ahead of the doc’s premiere today in the World
Cinema Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

Up the Yangtze is the
first feature-length documentary directed by Yung Chang. In the documentary,
Chang returns to the Yangtze River where his grandfather grew up and documents
the end of a way of life. Chang takes viewers on a cruise ship that offers
farewell tours of the about-to-be-flooded river. The comfortable lives of the
western passengers are contrasted with the difficult lives of the young Chinese
crew. Back on land, Chang’s camera gives viewers access to scenes including a
demonstration against the government’s relocation policy, and a family
assembling their possessions as the floodwaters rise.

The film was produced by Mila Aung-Thwin, John Christou and
Germaine Ying Gee Wong. NFB co-produced the film. Up the Yangtze is slated for an April 2008 release.

“We are so proud to be distributing this stunning and
heartbreaking true epic of life inside modern China,” said Zeitgeist’s
co-president, Nancy Gerstman. “Like the rest of the world, we’re fascinated and
horrified by the destruction caused by the Three Gorges Dam, and Up the
Yangtze gives an insiders’ perspective,
with compassion and dark humor.”

Sayedali Rawji, the interim director general of NFB’s
English program, commented: “Up the Yangtze is part of the growing body of work at the National Film Board of
Canada, offering an astonishing look at the changing face of our planet. We’re
proud that it has joined another acclaimed NFB co-produced documentary, Manufactured
Landscapes, in the Zeitgeist roster.”

—By Ned Berke