“China Heavyweight” shows how far people will go to get out of rural China.
The documentary shows a master trainer who recruits young people from central China to become professional boxers. The choice is stark: Train hard, get beat up, and become national heroes -- or fail and stay home and farm.
Canadian writer-director Yung Chang has been to Sundance before, with another documentary about Chinese life: “Up the Yangtze,” which followed young Chinese workers on a cruise ship on the Yangtze River as the Three Gorges Dam was wiping out those workers’ family farms.
“China Heavyweight” will screen in the World Cinema Documentary competition of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
