Yung Chang

Arts & Expression, East Asian, Film

He is a Canadian filmmaker currently based in Montreal, where he earned a degree in film production in 1999 from Concordia University. His first documentary film, 'Earth To Mouth', produced by the National Film Board of Canada, circulated widely on the international festival circuit, premiering at Hot Docs and winning awards at the International Film and Video Festival in Columbus, Ohio, and Montreal's Rencontres Internationales du documentaire.

He is also a graduate of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City, where he studied the Meisner technique. He makes innovative use of this methodology in his first feature-length documentary, 'Up the Yangtze', in which the highly contested Three Gorges Dam forms a dramatic and unsettling backdrop for a moving and richly detailed narrative of a peasant family negotiating unprecedented historic changes. Award highlights include: Best Canadian Documentary, 2007 Vancouver International Film Festival; Best Documentary Feature, 2008 San Francisco International Film Festival; 2008 Toronto International Film Festival Group Canada's Top 10 film;
Taipei Golden Horse Award for Best Documentary; finalist for the IDFA Joris Ivens Award, 2007 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; Planete Doc Review Millennium Award for Best Film, Warsaw; and Grand Jury nominee for best documentary in the World Cinema competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Yung Chang is also the recipient of the 2008 Yolande and Pierre Perrault award for most promising filmmaker at the 2008 Rendez-vous du cinema québecois. He received the 2008 Don Haig Award at Hot Docs and the Charles E. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina.

He is currently co-editing Fan Lixin's 'Last Train Home' and developing his next feature documentary about the fruit underworld.

Yung Chang video clip

Link to 'Up the Yangtze' selected clips

'Up the Yangtze'
Directed by Yung Chang
Produced by Germaine Ying Gee Wong

Photo credits for picture of Yung Chang

Photograph by Stephane Jolicoeur