Youth (Spring)

Dir. Wang Bing. 2023, France/Luxembourg/Netherlands. 215 mins. DCP. Wang Bing has been constructing epic documentary portraits of the economic condition of China throughout the volatile and transformative twenty-first century, and his latest, Youth (Spring) marks the beginning of his potentially most expansive work yet. Deeply patient in its observation, this film fully embeds the viewer with groups of young migrant workers in textile factories in a town near Shanghai named Zhili. Here, around 300,000 laborers arrive every year for employment in thousands of small workshops. Whether making clothes during punishingly long days or unwinding in their cramped, often windowless dorm rooms at night, the workers construct entirely new lives for themselves. Wang’s film feels like a summative work, but it’s the beginning of an even longer project, culled from copious amounts of footage filmed over the course of five years. An Icarus Films release. 

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