More than two decades after making his monumental West of the Tracks (2002), documentary auteur Wang Bing (b. 1967) has released a new cinematic fresco of Chinese workers. Whereas his debut work memorializes the declining Socialist industrial complex in Northeast China and its aging employees, the Youth trilogy chronicles the plights of young migrant workers struggling with the vagaries and pressures of a free capitalist market. Between 2014 and 2019, Wang Bing and his crew shot around 2,600 hours of footage in the garment-making township of Zhili, near Shanghai, with hundreds of thousands of seasonal laborers from all over the country sewing children’s clothes in some 18,000 workshops. The three installments of Youth—Spring, Hard Times and Homecoming—premiered in competition at the Cannes, Locarno and Venice film festivals, respectively. Taken together, this documentary trilogy not only provides a nuanced, empathetic and critical look at China’s fashion industry, but could also inspire in its audiences alternative experiences of time, space and the material fabric of our lives. 

Youth (Spring) Qingchun
The first in Wang Bing’s opus centered on young migrant laborers in Zhili employs his trademark long takes and fixed camera setups, contrasting routine days of sewing, stitching and scissoring with bustling street scenes and after-hours sequences set in the workers’ cramped living quarters, chancing upon dramas that inevitably emerge from such a repetitive, cloistered and threadbare existence. While Zhili’s privatized structure and incentive-based production model allows for certain advantages over the kind of centrally governed factories seen in earlier Wang films like West of the Tracks (2002), it also leaves employees at the mercy of predatory managers, a situation the director depicts as an endless tug-of-war for better pay. With textbook rigor, Wang captures a new economic reality that, for all it promises, has only fostered a new form of exploitation. – Jordan Cronk

Directed by Wang Bing

France/Hong Kong/Luxembourg/Netherlands 2023, DCP, color, 215 min. Mandarin with English subtitles

General Admission Tickets $10, $8 Non-Harvard student, seniors, Harvard faculty and staff. Harvard students admitted free to regularly priced shows.

Special event tickets (for in-person appearances) $15 – $20.

Tickets go on sale 30 minutes prior to show time at the box office and are also available in advance on the HFA website.