Wang Bing’s Cannes Documentary Explores Young Chinese Workers – Deadline

Check the label of that garment that hangs in your closet. If it says “Made in China”, there is a chance that it was sewn by one of the characters from WangBingdocumentary of Youth (spring)or someone like them.

Youth (Spring) – one of the two documentaries admitted to the main competition at the cannes Film Festival, which had not received a documentary in that prestigious category in nearly 20 years, was filmed over a five-year period in the Chinese city of Zhili, known as the country’s garment-manufacturing capital. Every year, young people from rural Anhui and other provinces come to the urban center in search of work. Thousands of privately owned garment “shops” are ready to employ them, or perhaps we should say exploit them.

Wang’s handheld camera peers into the crowded, fluorescent-lit workshops where young men and women sew garments at a breakneck pace, their fingers pushing fabric through the sewing machines so fast you could swear the filmmaker sped up the video. . It’s piecework, so the quicker you can get into a pair of fleece pants or a girl’s party dress, the better.

At night, the workers retire to company-owned “dormitories”: filthy dwellings with all the charm of a flop house. It’s a shared bathroom situation – inconvenient! – but on the plus side, each occupant is generously equipped with a plastic basin that can be used to soak tired feet or scrub dirty laundry. They eat meals on the go in disposable containers.

Despite how it may sound, YouthThe purpose of is not to expose abuse in the clothing trade (although it may make you deeply skeptical the next time you go shopping and see a Made in China jacket, say, on sale for a suspiciously cheap price). Wang’s intention is more subtly sociological: Youth it explores the connections and even the culture, in a sense, that can develop between people brought together under arduous circumstances.

Adolescents and twenty-somethings who mostly populate Youth they retain a surprising degree of vitality in circumstances you might think would reduce them to a bulge. They are so used to the job that even when the machines chew cloth in chattering fury, they carry on lively conversations among themselves. There is a lot of play going on, and banter between the young women and men veers into sexual subtext. A young woman tells a smitten coworker that he’s not her type and she defends herself against her pleas for love (she worries that she hasn’t had a real girlfriend before and that she might be a virgin). . But surprisingly, they end up negotiating a possible marriage. Love, in this environment of difficulties, seems to have all the romanticism of a commercial transaction.

Economic pressures completely circumscribe the lives of the characters in Youth. Multiple scenes in the three-and-a-half hour film show workers strategizing on how to get a few more pennies per garment from the “boss.” Fees range from 5 to perhaps 12 yuan a piece, or roughly 70 cents to $1.40 at current exchange rates (the documentary was filmed between 2014 and 2019, so it’s hard to say how much that translated into dollars during that time). period).

One scene underscores how the primacy of business interests impacts the lives of the young people in the film. After a young factory worker becomes pregnant, her mother is met by a supervisor who tells her that the teen must complete her clothing quota before she can take time off. The boss recommends that the girl have an abortion to make things easier.

“So, are you going to get rid of the baby?” the boss asks the woman. She meekly replies, “Yes.”

Youth he adopts a neutral and observant stance towards his subjects. It is not judging the young people who make it up or the system that needs their labor, but at the cheapest possible price. It is not a film that seeks consciously beautiful images, without shots of the moon reflected in the gutter, or the like, “no added aesthetic or dramatic touches,” as the Cannes program says. The festival notes that Wang is currently editing a sequel and that the finished project may last nine hours.

That running time is not out of the ordinary for Wang, perhaps the foremost China-based documentarian (the brilliant Chinese-born nonfiction filmmaker Nanfu Wang lives in New Jersey). His 2018 documentary dead soulsalso premiered in Cannes, with a duration of more than eight hours; Tie Xi Qu: west of the tracksreleased in the United States in 2007, it measured more than nine hours.

Youth (spring) is one of two documentaries that the filmmaker is presenting at Cannes this year. Man in black, just 60 minutes long, tells the story of Wang Xilin, the 86-year-old composer considered one of China’s most important classical artists. “During the Cultural Revolution,” notes Cannes, “he was subjected to severe persecution, beatings, imprisonment and torture.”

In his work, Wang is telling the story of his country from the 1950s onward, with an engaged but dispassionate eye (any more activist tone in his films would probably be prohibited). west of the slopes documented a period in China when it was transitioning from a state-run economy to one where free enterprise reigned (despite its ostensible claim to be a communist nation). In Youthwe see where Chinese capitalism has led: to conditions that seem similar to those of Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 19th century.^he century (also a center of textile manufacturing where young workers lived in company-owned barracks while working in the factories).

The film’s title should be considered ironic, because even if these young people barely manage to have fun and perhaps find a long-term romantic relationship, this is no way to spend their youth.

Qualification: Youth (spring)
Festival: Cannes (Main Competition)
Director: WangBing
Script: WangBing

Execution time: 212 minutes
Sales: international pyramid