Youth (Hard Times)

FIPRESCI award, 2024 Locarno Film Festival
Best Documentary Feature nomination, 2024 Golden Horse Awards
Official Selection, 2024 Toronto International Film Festival

Director Wang Bing returns to Zhili and its many textile factories, where jeans and sweatpants are stitched by 20-year-olds yakking over the unceasing chirring of sewing machines. In his previous Youth (Spring) (SDAFF ’23), Wang documented a community of teenagers entering adulthood, and the flirtatious energy in tight spaces that are a mix of labor camps and summer camp. In the subsequent YOUTH (HARD TIMES), garment workers may start out chasing dreams and chasing each other, but when their bosses start turning against them, they realize it’s time to start chasing fair wages.

Contemporary documentary’s greatest observer of everyday life, Wang Bing doesn’t turn class struggle into a cage match. Instead, we witness over an extended duration the gradual shift in the way these young women and men talk, testing out their newfound collective voice over tea breaks or in barely-lit dorm rooms. Stories of police brutality or fears of violent retaliation are aired in makeshift organizing spaces in response to factory bosses making up the rules of Chinese capitalism as they go. Economic oppression, and demands for economic justice, are as mundane as water bottles strewn on the floor or cigarette smoke puffed for hours on end. Nobody quite says the word “union,” but Wang depicts an inchoate spirit of solidarity, a youthful vitality in search of its own power.

– Brian Hu