Youth (Homecoming)

Official Selection, 2024 Venice Film Festival

The third and final installment of Wang Bing’s monumental Youth series starts once again in the garment manufacturing capital of Zhili, but has an eye beyond the factories and worker quarters. The 20-somethings who spend hours sewing clothes are tapped into a world beyond, making video calls and leaving audio messages to family and romantic partners. When Lunar New Year comes, the factories shut down and the workers go back to hometowns from Anhui to Yunnan. A cramped train ride home reveals them to be specks amongst a river of migrants. In their rural towns, there are fireworks and weddings, a 180 from the monotony and uncertainty of manufacturing life.

The brilliance of Wang Bing’s documentary – and what makes this such a profound closing statement – is that YOUTH (HOMECOMING) refuses to see these worlds as separate. City/country, modernity/tradition: these are false dichotomies in a market that subsumes all. Money flows from factories to families, and Zhili is replenished by rural youth seeking work. For young people like Shi Wei, Fang Lingping, and their new spouses, relationships are intimate but also economic, sometimes cold and sometimes teeming with vigor, not unlike the Zhili factories themselves, their fluorescent lights welcoming the young back for another season.

– Brian Hu