Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze — which focuses on the employees of a Chinese cruise ship touring the titular river — is the homegrown doc debut of the year, and you have no excuse for missing it. Not only does it screen Feb. 1 as part of Canada’s Top Ten (9:30pm at Cinematheque Ontario) but it’s being presented by the Reel Asian Film Festival on Feb. 3 (4:30pm at Empire Theatres at Empress Walk) and being showcased Feb. 6 (6:30pm and 9:15pm at the Bloor Cinema) by the good folks at Doc Soup (all this before opening locally on Feb. 8). Its director, 30-year-old Concordia grad Yung Chang, will be present for all three screenings, and if he’s glowing when you see him, it’s just residue from Sundance, where the film received rave reviews and an American distribution detail. Chang spoke with EYE WEEKLY from a camel-hide couch in Park City, Utah, apparently just after waving hello to Neil Young and Jacqueline Bisset (who he says were together but not, you know, together).

You must be sick of talking about this by now, but is it true that you got the idea for the film during a family trip to China in 2002?
Yes. I arrived in Chungqing, which is this apocalyptic, Blade Runner–like city. And when the marching band on the cruise ship started to play “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as we came aboard, I knew this had to be a movie. My mind was reeling with possibilities. Over the three years it took to research the film, it became clear I had to tell the story of the people working on the boat — a commentary on contemporary China seen through the microcosm of this cruise ship. The idea was to keep it simple, and then the larger themes would sort of just leak into the film.

That seems to be the difference between your film and Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, which frames the Three Gorges situation largely in aesthetic terms. In your film, you focus on people while the scenery just passes by.
There’s a kind of documentary filmmaking that I call the “doomsday genre.” [For my film] I wasn’t trying to find those kinds of abstractions, or Herzogian apocalyptic perceptions. You’re right to say that those elements appear in Up the Yangtze in a passing sort of way. My movie is the Cassavetes version of what’s going on; I wanted to capture the raw emotions. And with a Chinese family, that’s difficult. I was lucky that I was able to get them to open up.

You’re a Canadian filmmaker, but I take it your Chinese background helped to establish a certain level of trust with your subjects.
Yes. And it would have been different if I had been a completely Chinese filmmaker making a film on this subject — like Jia Zhang-ke did with his beautiful film Still Life. I think I’m kind of in between Baichwal and Jia. I’ve made a film that reflects a certain duality.

And also a film that resists taking the easy route of scoring points off the cruise-line passengers….
The cruise line markets the trip as an educational journey, and a lot of the passengers fall into that PBS-viewer demographic. But as tourists, they’re still innocent, and they see China through glazed eyes. They’re easy targets. I had plenty of the kind of footage you describe, but I left it — it’s too simple to do that. All you need is a small dose to get the sense of it. There were more important stories to talk about.