Youth (Hard Times)

Neither a purely purely individualistic perspective nor a collective portrait. The second part of Wang Bing’s epic Youth documentary focuses on the problems of workers in the textile workshops of Zhili, fighting to be paid at a just rate – or at all. 

The second part of Wang Bing’s documentary series Youth moves away from the atmosphere of occasional frivolity within the punishing context of textile workshops in Zhili, China. Focusing entirely on the type of workplaces and cramped living spaces that Youth (Spring) introduced, the central matter here is the problem of getting paid – at a just rate, or at all. We see the consequences of bosses who are in debt, haggle down pay rates, or simply skip town altogether. And we learn of the historic occasion in 2011 when similar tensions led to violent clashes between workers and police.

Wang’s approach to editing the enormous mass of collected, raw material is carefully organised. He wishes neither to privilege individuals and their ‘story arcs’ (as many documentaries do), nor to produce the portrait of a faceless collectivity. Both these approaches, he believes, flatten possible perspectives and omit too much important detail. Rather, with each person filmed, he allows us time to grasp them in their particularity, to notice how they cope or struggle with their work situation. It is across the entirety of the project that we are implicitly asked to see the general, social dimension of the problems of contemporary China.

– Cristina Álvarez López

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