I’m quiet tonight as a few scenes from Last Train Home continue in my mind.

Every year, as Chinese New Year approaches, 130 million people in China who have left their homes to work in cities return home, creating the single largest migration in the world every single year. Last Train Home, created by Chinese Canadian Lixin Fan, focuses on two of those 130 million people–Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin. They left their two children as infants in their rural village in Sichuan Province to be cared for by an elderly grandmother and set out for Guangzhou with the hope of giving their son and daughter a better life than they had experienced themselves.

The stunning contrast between the crowded, riotous train station as they and many others literally push their way through to leave their factory work and dormitory living to journey home and the peaceful, magnificent landscapes they can see from their train window left me stunned. Chaos and beauty–true of the physical world as well as their relationships.

Though these parents gave all they literally could for the sake of their children, their relationships are critically broken with a wall between the father and daughter in particular that you can nearly reach out and touch as you watch them on the screen in front of you on the other side of the world captured in time. Their pain is intense. Somehow, it became even more real to me with the English subtitles as I was forced to focus on expressions and tones rather than simply words.

As their 15-year-old daughter wrestles with her own desire for independence and the hole left in her heart from absent parents, I realized I was literally holding my breath while I watched, wanting to see something happen that wasn’t going to happen while feeling somewhat embarrassed that I was getting such an intimate view of their brokenness. It isn’t fair. Her mother told her daughter she had not yet tasted the bitterness of life; I think she’s known it all along.

This is one family’s story, one intimate and intense enough to leave you holding your breath. Multiply their story by the 130 million who share similar journeys as migrant workers and this movie becomes epic in impact, no less necessary that Schindler’s List or Hotel Rwanda as we consider the reality of the world outside our own small borders.

I want you to see this. I want you to own it and share it with others. I want more people to understand the lives of Zhang Changhua, Chen Suqin, and Zhang Qin and the 129,999,997 others their lives represent. So, I’m giving away a copy of the DVD here.