Eerie yet earthy, this is an engrossing documentary about the last days of the Yangtze - the great river as China has known it for millennia.

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in the world, will soon flood many towns and villages, and has already created abandoned "ghost cities." Residents along the rising water's path have been or will be relocated.

Some go to better circumstances than they ever dreamed of, but others move to even more precarious subsistence living. Some go uncomplainingly, still true to one of the booming economy's last communist vestiges: self-sacrifice for the greater good. Then there are those forcibly removed by officials they don't have enough money to bribe.

Canadian director Yung Chang shows us these and countless other telling, irony-drenched details as he travels on a "farewell" luxury cruise - a lucrative operation aimed at North American and European tourists - through the disappearing world his grandfather came from. Wisely, though, Chang focuses on two young, local crew members, a peasant girl from an illiterate, displaced family and a middle-class only child whose gifts and arrogance are common among his generation.

In this way, "Up the Yangtze" shows us the individual impact of a big picture that is changing the lives of millions. In English, and in Mandarin and Sichuan with English subtitles.

UP THE YANGTZE:

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>Not rated: language.

>Playing: Town Center 5, Encino; Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Royal, West L.A.; Regency South Coast Village, Santa Ana.