Chunyun

“”Chunyun,” the world’s largest annual human migration takes place every Chinese New Year. This cultural phenomenon consists of over three billion passenger-journeys, largely for the purpose of spending treasured time with family.”

This short film by Jonathan Bregel is not so much a documentary on the subject but, really, a video poem about it. As a provincial Chicagoan, I’d at least heard of this custom but Bregel’s short gives it both a physical and an emotional substance. It becomes something both totally mundane and familiar and totally alien and distant, another land, another time.