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.