Last Train Home (2009) — China

Director Lixin Fan pays tribute to Chinese migrant workers in this powerful documentary about what he calls "the world's largest human migration." Once each year at the Chinese New Year, 130 million peasant workers leave their urban factories and return home to their rural villages and the families they've left behind in order to make money. They are the human cogs in the machine of global capitalism who sew our $100 blue jeans. After watching this film you will never read the words "Made in China" the same way. Fan focuses on one couple, Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin, who've worked for fifteen years in a textile factory. They've sacrificed their present lives in hopes of a better future for their children, teenagers Qin and Yang, who are being raised 1300 miles away back home by their grandmother. Zhang and Suqin urge their kids to "study hard" in order to avoid their own fate, so they are devastated when Qin drops out of school and starts working at a factory just like theirs. In Mandarin with English subtitles.