-By Daniel Eagan

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For many of the 130 million migrant workers in China, the New Year marks the only time they can return to their families in the countryside. Under the best circumstances their journeys can take days; bad weather and other factors can make travel even more difficult. Last Train Home uses the experiences of the Zhang family to detail just how harsh life can be for migrant workers.

Zhang Changhua and his wife Chen Suqin work in a garment factory in the town of Guangzhou, leaving the care of their two children Qin and Yang to Chen's mother, who lives in Huilong, a village in Sichuan some 1,300 miles away. Qin, 17 at the start of filming, resents her parents' absence as much as she dislikes living on a farm. Zhang and his wife, meanwhile, live in a cramped dorm with few amenities and work seven days a week in what viewers in the United States would call a sweatshop.

Director Lixin Fan, who also co-edited and shot much of the footage over a three-year period, takes a cool, even detached approach to his material. His film gains its strength from small details: the bucket of water Chen uses to wash her feet at night, scraps of fabric gathered for recycling, mosquitoes that plague the children during an evening meal. Gradually a grim portrait emerges, one of an underclass exploited both in an impoverished countryside and in gritty industrial cities. Work is hard and relentless, both on the farm and in the factory where the Zhangs sew blue jeans.

The parents are strikingly stoic, resigned to living in poverty while urging their children to better themselves through school. Qin and Yang are typical children, rebellious, even angry about their parents' absence. By showing how normal and recognizable the Zhangs and their problems are, the film forces us to decide whether cheap jeans and t-shirts we buy justify treating people so harshly.

Fan structures Last Train Home around the grueling, often chaotic trips Zhang and Chen undertake to see their children over the New Year holiday. They have moments of startling beauty—a trail streaking across a winter landscape, Zhang sitting atop a ferry at sunset—but overall are filmed as nightmarish endurance tests. But the journeys actually help connect viewers to the Zhangs. (Who hasn't had bad experiences while traveling?) This sense of connection is one of the strongest, and most disturbing, elements in Last Train Home. Too much of our daily lives, from our food and clothes to our cities and governments, depends of exploiting people exactly like the Zhangs. It doesn't detract from Fan's accomplishments to point out that he could have shot a similar film almost anywhere in the world.