Yung Chang is a Canadian filmmaker based in Montreal. He has a degree in film production from Montreal's Concordia University and has studied the Meisner technique at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. He has lived and worked in the United States and traveled extensively throughout China. His first documentary film, Earth To Mouth, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, won praise for its beautifully crafted meditation on food production and migrant labor. Yung Chang, made his feature documentary, "Up The Yangtze" in 2007. The film used China's highly contested Three Gorges Dam as a dramatic 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" is Chang's sophomore film. He is 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 currently writing "Eggplant", his first feature film, about a Chinese wedding photographer.
Was on a talk-show with Werner Herzog at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam.
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In central China, a Master coach recruits poor rural teenagers and turns them into Western-style boxing champions. Through hard work and discipline, these boys and girls come of age, trained in the art of boxing and the game of life. They are filled with Olympic dreams, hoping to become China's next amateur heroes. But the pull of professionalism also weighs upon their shoulders. Their coach hopes to show them the way. The top student boxers face dramatic choices as they graduate - should they fight for the collective good as amateurs or for themselves and their own personal gain as professionals? It's a metaphor for the choices that everyone faces now, in the New China.