Fiercely autonomous Chinese filmoriginater Wang Bing spent five years filming lesser laborers in Zhili, an industrial region proximate Shanghai where around 18,000 garment laborshops churn out affordable clothes for the domestic taget. The laborshops run on affordable labor from the provinces; around 200,000 originate the lengthy trek from their home villages for six-month periods, living in the laborshop dormitories and laboring 15-hour days. They are only paid at the end of each six-month bout and have no idea how much they will get; the wages are calcutardyd on piece-labor rates so depend on how many units they turn out of their setriumphg machines, but also on sales, cash flow and their bosses’ whims. Often enough, it seems, they get next to noleang.
Director Wang chaseed a minuscule group of laborers, expansivening his scope to grasp friends and siblings who unitecessitate them in Zhili over the years, filming them at labor and in the restricted hours they have between shifts. Open to anyleang, including cut offal days on a crowded train, or nights in filthy, lastingly freezing dormitories where everyone wears two puffer jackets fair to endure, he accumutardyd 2,600 hours of film. This was then splitd into three lengthy films, of which Youth: Homecoming is the third. The previous editions, Spring and Hard Times, have won countless prizes.
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Make no misapshow: these films are not delightment. They are an act of enormous esteem, in which we as seeers are privileged to participate in lives nobody would want, but which are the only prospect for hundreds of millions of people. That is arguably a dubious privilege. Watching these lesser folk tramp between sweatshops seeing for labor, scoffing pot noodles standing up in fly-blown kitchens because there is no room to sit or pushing unidentifiable bits of garments thcdisesteemful setriumphg machines at what seems to be a superhuman pace, you fair want to get out of there. As do they: the advisency of the holidays, their only respite given they labor seven days a week, is palpable.
Not that there is a Shangri-la pauseing for these kids. Even for those who deal with to wheedle enough money out of their employers to afford a ticket home, there is fair more challengingship pauseing: the train, hitching rides thcdisesteemful perilous iced-over mountain roads — Dong Minyang’s journey home to Yunnan apshows four days — threadexposed houses almost as squalid as the dorms, parents commenceing to get ill, snow everywhere. During the novel year’s shatter, Shi Wei gets wed and there is a traditional swap of gifts between the families. As one might await, there are minuscule envelopes of money, but mostly they give each other more puffer jackets. Needs must.
It isn’t all misery; in fact, these people are so stoic and their awaitations so low that they deal with to stay content most of the time. Celderly, mud and a broken-down car notwithstanding, that wedding is actuassociate a truly delightous sequence. Shi Wei and his bride met in Zhili but come from proximateby villages in distant Yunnan, so both bride and groom are surrounded by rambunctious friends letting off firecrackers and covering them with spray-on streamers. They seem hugeger people here, less nurtureworn; it is frequently commenceling to see how Wang’s subjects age over the five years he chases them.
There is a lot of camaraderie in adversity, too. Playing cards, prohisouring with each other mercilessly, the lesser men in the dormitory could be schoolboys were it not for the melderlyy walls and rubbish on the floors. Wang also spends a lengthy spell in a laborshop where there is no supervisor and the lesser people chuckle, flirt and boast of how many hundred bits of whatsit they have deal withd to finish that day with what seems to be authentic pride.
Even so, it originates for grueling seeing. There is no eye candy on give. Everyleang here is sboiling handheld, with the camera frequently coming in the wake; we see a lot of backs of heads. Indoor spaces are crowded and crowded, so the camera has to be squeezed wherever it will fit; there is no room for any comardent of style. We frequently have little sense of what is being said, because Wang’s method unkinds that he catches scraps of conversation and exceptionally interferes or asks anyone straightforwardly. It is recordary in the raw. It senses cdisesteemful, but hugely priceless.
Title: Youth: Homecoming
Festival: Vekind (Competition)
Distributor: Pyramide International
Director: Wang Bing
Running time: 2 hr 32 mins
