U.S. indie distributor Zeitgeist Films scooped up the EyeSteelFilm/National Film Board doc Up the Yangtze a day before its Friday premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Nancy Gerstman, co-president of 20-year-old Zeitgeist, remarked in a statement: ‘We are so proud to be distributing this stunning and heartbreaking true epic of life inside modern China. Like the rest of the world, we’re fascinated and horrified by the destruction caused by the Three Gorges Dam, and Up the Yangtze gives an insiders’ perspective, with compassion and dark humor.’

Zeitgeist is also the U.S. distributor of Jennifer Baichwal’s award-winning doc Manufactured Landscapes, another NFB copro.

Up the Yangtze writer/director Yung Chang was inspired to make the film after a ‘farewell cruise’ along the mythic Yangtze river. The Quebec filmmaker says he was struck by the ‘strange landscape of chaos and decay’ along the waterway. The poignant doc chronicles the Yu family, who were among two million Chinese forced to abandon their homes due to construction of the gargantuan dam.

‘Up the Yangtze is part of the growing body of work at the National Film Board of Canada offering an astonishing look at the changing face of our planet,’ said Sayedali Rawji, interim director general of NFB English Program.

Chang’s first feature is produced by Mila Aung-Thwin and John Christou from EyeSteelFilm and Germain Ying Gee Wong from the NFB, in association with CBC Newsworld/Radio-Canada and American Documentary’s P.O.V.

A late April 2008 release is planned. The film is being distributed in Canada by the NFB and KinoSmith Films.