Wang Bing's monumental YOUTH trilogy is driven by the thrum of industrial sewing machines — just like the lives of the young garment workers portrayed. 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 everything from padded jackets, to jeans, to pillows.

Intimate and evocative, these films are a striking portrait of young lives in an alien environment that's radically different from the rural homes so many of them come from.

“Throughout his trilogy, Wang Bing’s modus operandi has been expansion through repetition, a recursive exploration of similar spaces that nevertheless exhibits differing emotions, concerns, and personalities. In doing so, and in spending so much time with his remarkable, downtrodden subjects, he does a great deal to reconfigure what the concept of home means; utilizing previous structural strategies before breaking away once again perfectly embodies the dynamic of continual reconsideration endemic to their experiences.” —Ryan Swen, Slant