At the 2007 Vancouver International Film Festival, Up The Yantze, directed by 30-year-old Montreal filmmaker, Yung Chang, won the NFB's Best Canadian Documentary Award. This is a visually stunning film about the building of China's Three Gorges Dam, its effects on the two million people who live along the river, and the cost of its development, namely the disappearance of riverside cities, towns and villages.

Chang has given us a work of art that must be appreciated at several levels. From its opening shot, it is clear that this film is breathtaking in its visual beauty. Soon, we are also moved by Chang's social conscience.

Following the world premiere of Up The Yangtze, I had the opportunity to visit with Chang and learned that not only is he one of the finest filmmakers to grace the Canadian landscape, he is also, without doubt, a charming young man who speaks with passion about China, the home of his parents.

For Chang, there is an inescapable reality to the Chinese landscape; it is full of a kind of terrible beauty that reflects the scars of its tumultuous history.

Up The Yangtze unpacks Chang's own personal journey to a place that connects him to his past, and also to the people of the present living along the river. The film becomes, for him, a gateway to a collaborative process that results in the telling of other people's stories. As he says, he is "only along for the ride." He explained to me that the story of the Three Gorges Dam "unfolds and becomes something much deeper" than he could ever have imagined, to the extent that he becomes a participant in the "collaborative process of humanism itself."

When one fully grasps the cinematic connection formed by the river to the people who live alongside it, we begin to feel, in a palpable way, the pain of China's headlong rush into the world economy. In the end, human life is a commodity easily traded away for an imagined, prosperous future. The river, says Chang, is "the grand metaphor of life." But also, in very real terms, the river is also a passage to hell, where the livelihood of an entire community is sacrificed for the irrevocable march of economic progress. As one peasant states so simply and so ironically, "China must be very powerful, it can stop the river."

And yet, for Chang, there is joy to be found in the process of storytelling. The story of the river, while shaped by economic development, allows Chang to explore new modes of human relationships. Up the Yangtze connects Chang the filmmaker with Yu Shui, one of the film's subjects. Yu Shui works on a cruise ship carrying western tourists who, gazing mindlessly at the passing landscape, are "removed but sometimes concerned but not that concerned, enough to take a picture or enough to stay within the boundaries of their comfort [but certainly not enough] to get off that and to explore deeper," explains Chang. It is these same tourists who watch the river, like some great dragon, devour Yu Shui's family home while she, out of necessity, works as a servant of the cruise ship and, by extension, the river itself. Her family, like many in their community, cannot afford to educate her.

As one delves deeper into Chang's experience as a filmmaker it becomes quickly evident that he holds an intense passion to "explore deeper."

Spurred on by his mentor and executive producer Daniel Cross, Chang was motivated to take seriously what has become a model of social responsibility. We learn from Chang that Cross, after producing S.P.I.T., a film about a squeegee kid, employed Eric "Roach" Denis, the main character, who eventually went on to make his own award winning film. Chang took to heart "Daniel's influence and ... inspiration. We have all learned," says Chang, "a responsibility towards the subjects. It was repeated to me while I was making [Up The Yangtze] that I had affected their fate, especially Yu Shui's fate. It's important to follow that through and not leave them dangling. I think there's a shared exchange. I owe her, she doesn't owe me anything, but I owe her. That's why ... we're really bound to the subject." And how did Chang manifest this sense of obligation? "Our production company ... decided to help her pay for [her education]. We owed her at the very least that much."

So often the power of film and literature is not in what is said or in the obvious, but in what is hidden from view. For Chang "that's the purpose of art ... filmmaking, music, or literature ... the point of it is that we do look for those hidden meanings. Everybody looks for the subtext in something, or as creative people we look for the subtext in something. As human beings we are always searching for that kind of deeper meaning underneath the superficial layer. I think it's very easy to provide images, no matter how mundane and banal, and somehow one is able to find an interpretation of that. In this film, if you take out my story and follow the story of [Yu Shui, as she] change[s] on the cruise ship, it is a very linear story, but it's the role of the artist, or the role of the audience to discover those deeper meanings. That's the power of cinema; you don't always have to explain everything. It's not journalism."

Chang, through the art of storytelling, tells a greater story, one in which he encourages us to see the landscape as a canvas on which people live in tandem with a nature scarred by government and bureaucracy. On one level this scarring reveals a deep layer of social, political and economic wounding. But on a deeper level, the scar reveals a strange beauty, sometimes too powerful for words, a beauty that inspires exhilarating joy but is the result of the most profound sorrow and the uprooting of entire communities. To participate in that story as viewers we must be cognizant of that desperate duality.

Richard Toews interviewed Yung Chang at the 2007 Vancouver International Film Festival. Chang is currently busy working on new projects. One with the Canadian Film Centre and the National Film Board of Canada about the fruit underworld (based on the book The Fruit Hunters), and he is also writing his first feature, a film about Chinese wedding photographers. Up The Yangtze is available on DVD in English with Chinese subtitles.