Youth (Spring)
July's Top 30 Films
•
3h 35m
Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2023 • 215 minutes
The town of Zhili, about 95 miles from Shanghai, is a center for the children’s garment industry. Workers in their teens and early twenties come from surrounding provinces to live in sparse, trash-strewn concrete dorms in the same buildings as the small factories where they spend their days sewing leggings, shorts, fluffy skirts, and jackets with Mickey Mouse hoods.
A remarkably intimate documentary filmed over five years, YOUTH takes us into these independent workshops — many on a street named Happiness Road. Relationships form and fall apart. Young women fend off their co-workers’ advances. Managers and employees engage in intense negotiations over piece-work rates. Unexpected pregnancies throw couples and their families into turmoil. There are fights over shared washrooms, decisions over whether to stay or quit and go home, and many, many meals of take-out noodles.
A successor to Wang Bing’s 2017 film BITTER MONEY, YOUTH is not an exposé of the garment industry. Instead, it draws us into the lives of its subjects — young people who don’t make their beds, worry about having the latest iPhone, and occasionally engage in a food fight. Like so many of us, they’re doing the best they can in a challenging environment.
"Critics' Pick! An exhortation not to forget the unseen.” —The New York Times
Up Next in July's Top 30 Films
-
Green White Green (Abba T. Makama)
Directed by Abba T. Makama • Drama • With Samuel Abiola Robinson, Dabis Christopher • 2016 • 102 minutes
Shot on location in Lagos, and playing like a cross between American Graffiti and Be Kind Rewind, in this richly textured and frequently funny look at Nigeria's next generation, a group of yo...
-
Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism's Un...
Directed by Stephen Ujlaki, Christopher Jacob Jones • Documentary • With Peter Coyote • 2024 • 89 minutes
BAD FAITH explores the dangerous rise of Christian Nationalism in the United States. Part archival chronicle, part exposé, the film reveals the secretive political machinery that has relentl...
-
Sherman's March (Ross McElwee)
Directed by Ross McElwee • Documentary • 1986 • 155 minutes
When First Run released Ross McElwee's Sundance Award winning Sherman's March in 1986, it went on to become one of the largest grossing documentaries ever. Audiences and critics alike fell in love with McElwee's "quirky, funny and fasci...
