Youth (Hard Times)
New: Documentaries
•
3h 46m
Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2024 • 226 minutes
YOUTH (HARD TIMES) is the second installment in Chinese director Wang Bing’s monumental series chronicling the lives of migrant garment workers — some as young as 15 — in the Zhili district of Huzhou City. Wang immerses himself in the lives of these workers, as they try to find potential dates, negotiate better piece-work rates with bosses, and sew, sew, sew, everything from padded jackets, to jeans, to pillows.
Life seems hard, but stable. Then, a workshop owner brutally beats an employee and flees. With no boss and no pay, the workers organize to sell the shop’s sewing machines and pocket the money.
There are 300,000 migrant garment workers from surrounding provinces in Zhili, and while YOUTH (HARD TIMES) captures a sense of their struggles, it also highlights a growing solidarity. But the workers also recognize — as the film’s sole interview makes clear — that ultimately they are up against the forces of capital and the state, and those forces won’t hesitate to crush them if it thinks they are getting too far out of line.
Intimate and evocative, YOUTH (HARD TIMES) is a striking portrait of young lives in an alien environment that's radically different from the rural homes so many of them come from.
Up Next in New: Documentaries
-
Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs)
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 74 minutes
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her ...
-
La Camioneta
Directed by Mark Kendall • Documentary • 2021 • 71 minutes
After eight years, American public school buses are auctioned off by the state school system. Filmmaker Mark Kendall follows the extraordinary second life of one decommissioned school bus as it travels from 3000 miles from Pennsylvania t...
-
Four Paths to Dignity
Directed by Gabriela Chaim Tumax • Documentary • 2022 • 28 minutes
Four Paths to Dignity profiles the pursuit of dignity for Guatemalan midwives. The midwives confront challenges, as they battle racism and a health establishment that strives to prevent them from providing care that is culturally...
