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 (Hard Times) Qingchun: Ku

Focusing on the factory laborers’ economic struggles and workplace conflicts, the second installment of Youth follows multiple narrative threads that stretch and tighten, sometimes to a breaking point of violence and despair. A young woman keeps making mistakes and must redo several batches of trousers, while her colleagues discuss ways to dodge the manager’s surveillance. Just released from police detention after an altercation with his boss, a young man searches in vain for his lost account book. Parents pore over sewing machines while their child plays with scissors and cell phones. From the balcony outside their shop, a group of workers watch their indebted boss beat up a fabric supplier and run away without paying their wages, so they sell the shop’s sewing machines while the landlord cuts the power and water of their living quarters. In another dark dorm, a worker who made tons of unsold denim recounts his participation in a labor riot and the ensuing police brutality. The exhaustion of overtime and deadlines thus alternates with the anxiety of dead time and wasted time, accruing into the bitterness at the core of Wang Bing’s trilogy.

Directed by Wang Bing

France/Luxembourg/Netherlands 2024, DCP, color, 226 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.