160 minutes / Color
Mandarin / English subtitles
Release: 2024
Copyright: 2024
Shi Wei, a young migrant garment worker, flops back onto a pile of soft fabric bundles on his workshop’s floor, cellphone in hand. “Shit, I’m exhausted,” he says to the boss who’s trying to get him to sew more clothing before the Lunar New Year break. “I’m beat, I tell you.”
Work in the garment factories of Zhili, where some 300,000 migrants from rural China sew clothing, is winding down for the season. Finally, the incessant hum of sewing machines fades away. Now it’s time for the workers to try and convince their managers to pay them so they can return home for New Year celebrations.
YOUTH (Homecoming) is the final installment in Wang Bing’s ambitious trilogy on the young workers of Zhili, shot over five years. But in contrast to the previous films, here Wang focuses more closely on a handful of characters. We follow them on their journeys back to their families, riding packed trains and negotiating perilous mountain roads. Back home, the factories of Zhili seem far away, as Shi Wei and another young worker, Fang Lingping, celebrate weddings.
After the holidays end, the newlyweds and other workers head back to Zhili. YOUTH is a fitting end to the series — a quieter and more intimate film, and a powerful record of the unseen young labor force that drives garment production at a steep personal cost.
“A wondrously insightful dilution of a generation caught on the periphery of industrialisation… After almost half a decade of conversations and observations, it is oddly lovely that Bing finds his conclusion far away from Zhili’s churning hub, tracing long winding threads to off-road villages. YOUTH (HOMECOMING) is about connection and conflict, a long-form homage to all the things that pushed us away from the family home and all the things that draw us back.” —Anna McKibbin, Little White Lies
“A genuinely sorrowful film about how deeply the churn of industry has worked its way into people's bones… [YOUTH (HOMECOMING)], captures workers as they attempt to escape the grasp of capitalist drudgery, which has so molded and contorted them, that it may as well be a part of their very beings.” —Siddhant Adlakha, Variety
“A social and generational fresco, one that requires a commensurate set of subjects. As in his two previous entries, Wang looks for narrative echoes, seeing questions from one vignette resolve themselves much later in another… The young migrants wrestle with filial responsibility for those they must support, and they look queasily towards their own futures, wondering what kind of joy could Happiness Road afford to a child.” —Ben Croll, IndieWire
“The trilogy presents a wealth of poignant, striking material. And if the many scenes of people in workshops ever feels boring or repetitive to watch, try to imagine what it must be like to actually have to do that work, day in and day out.” —Hyperallergic
“Throughout his trilogy, Wang Bing’s modus operandi has been expansion through repetition, a recursive exploration of similar spaces that nevertheless exhibits differing emotions, concerns, and personalities. In doing so, and in spending so much time with his remarkable, downtrodden subjects, he does a great deal to reconfigure what the concept of home means; utilizing previous structural strategies before breaking away once again perfectly embodies the dynamic of continual reconsideration endemic to their experiences.” —Ryan Swen, Slant
Select Accolades
Documents China's rapid economic and social transformation by following the rural workers who leave their Yunnan hometown to move to the city of Huzhou to work in its textile factories.
Wang Bing | 2017 | 152 minutes | Color | Mandarin | English subtitles
Three little sisters live alone in a small village in the high mountains of the Yunnan region. The little girls don't go to school, spending their days working in the fields or wandering in the village.
Wang Bing | 2016 | 153 minutes | Color | English; Mandarin | English subtitles
Individual and collective stories unfold in Zhili's textile workshops, becoming ever more dramatic as the seasons go by. The second installment of Wang Bing's epic profile of Chinese garment workers.
Wang Bing | 2024 | 226 minutes | Color | Mandarin | English subtitles
The first installment of Wang Bing's epic profile of Chinese garment workers.
Wang Bing | 2023 | 215 minutes | Color | Mandarin | English subtitles
