Bitter Money
Migration
•
2h 36m
Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2016 • 152 minutes
The people in Wang Bing's BITTER MONEY lie in filthy, cramped apartments, stare at their phones for far too long, spend time on their balconies overlooking drab streets in which all the buildings look the same, and work long hours for little pay in noisy and stiflingly hot garment factories.
The city of Huzhou, where the film is shot, is home to 18,000 clothing factories. They are staffed by about 300,000 workers, many of them migrants from rural areas in the surrounding provinces. BITTER MONEY follows a handful of these workers, both at work where they may labor for more than 12 hours a day and in their off-hours, as they hang around shabby dorms drinking, dreaming of home, worrying about getting paid, and trying to decide whether their jobs are worth keeping.
Wang Bing brings his signature approach to the subject, never offering an overt condemnation of a system that promises a better life to rural youth, but entraps them in a grindingly dull existence. The camera watches carefully, lingering on shots, moving from one conversation to another. More powerful than any commentary, this technique captures the contours of the characters' lives, trapped as they are in abusive relationships, oppressive jobs, and dispiriting surroundings.
Up Next in Migration
-
Moi, Un Noir (Jean Rouch)
Directed by Jean Rouch • Documentary • 1958 • 70 minutes
Winner of the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc in 1958, MOI, UN NOIR marked Jean Rouch's break with traditional ethnography, and his embrace of the collaborative and improvisatory strategies he called "shared ethnography" and "ethnofiction."
... -
Inner Borderlines
Directed by Luis Mancha • Documentary • With Leo Chavez, María Herrera-Sobek, Francisco Lomelí, Belinda Campos, Raúl Fernandez, Mario García, Ellen McCracken, Eleanor Guzman • 2014 • 72 minutes
Inner Borderlines follows Alejandro Morales around Southern California as he explores a variety of top...
-
The Metal Stork
Directed by Joan López Lloret • Documentary • 2012 • 80 minutes
Twenty years have passed since the signing of the Peace Accords that ended the civil war in El Salvador (1980-92), a conflict in which the army and the FMLN´s guerrillas confronted each other. The operations of the armed forces in r...