Yung Chang

Yung Chang is a Canadian filmmaker currently based in Montreal, where he earned a degree in film production in 1999 from Concordia University. His parents are both first-generation Chinese immigrants to Canada. Through their influence, Yung maintains a strong interest in contemporary Chinese issues. Since 1996, he has spent extended periods in China and has travelled throughout the country.

His first documentary film, EARTH TO MOUTH, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, is a beautifully crafted meditation on migrant farm labour, food production and Canada’s Chinese community. It circulated widely on the international festival circuit, 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 made 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. UP THE YANGTZE played at numerous festivals, including Sundance, and was one of the top-grossing documentary box office releases in 2008.

CHINA HEAVYWEIGHT, Chang's sophomore film, is an intense and intimately observed narrative documentary; following the lives of a boxing coach and his two fighters in rural China. The film uses the burgeoning sport of Western-style boxing to explore social change in China. It will have its world premiere in official competition at Sundance 2012.

He is currently in production on THE FRUIT HUNTERS, a feature documentary about nature, commerce and obsession in the fruit underworld, slated for a fall 2012 release. He is also writing EGGPLANT, a feature fiction, about a Taiwanese wedding photographer in China.