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Agan Town: Fifteen years after coal mining ends

Agan is a small town located in Northwestern China, close to Gansu Province’s capital city, Lanzhou. For almost 600 hundred years, the town was rich because of its abundance of coal. But by 2000, after years of exploiting this resource, there was no more coal and the town went bankrupt. Thousands of people lost their jobs.  Fifteen years later Agan is little more than a ghost town—young people have moved out, leaving behind their children with their old parents; the coal mine is abandoned and people are living in extreme poverty. This documentary navigates the living conditions of the remaining town residents.

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