Wang Bing’s Epic Textile Worker Trilogy Gets Intimate with Youth (Hard Times)

Continuing his monumental Youth trilogy, following the lives of young migrant laborers in the Yangtze Delta garment region, Chinese documentarian Wang Bing returns to the festival circuit this year with the precisely titled second installment Youth (Hard Times). 

I wrote about the necessity of the slow, relentless tone of the first installment, Spring, last year, but I will provide a primer here for those previously uninitiated. Wang Bing lived in the Zhili region of China, known as a hub for privately owned clothing sweatshops. He filmed the social and working lives of the migrant workers, mainly from the Anhui province, in Zhili from 2014 to 2019, producing an epic 10-hour long work, now split into three parts. The young migrants must work as fast as possible in order to scrape together their paltry earnings, but they also argue, chat and laugh like any group of young people. 

It might be difficult to believe that Wang Bing is able to glean further insights after the sheer length of Spring, but Youth (Hard Times) evolves Wang’s ideas about labor and humanity in a way that is paradoxically both darker and lighter. Hard Times is just as unflinching as Spring in its repetitive nature, but the second installment adds a dynamic approach to the material that was lacking in Spring. 

In Hard Times, Wang’s subjects interact with him in a way they didn’t in Spring, to the extent that the youths nearly take over the direction, telling him who to film, and where. As we follow one older man up a flight of dormitory stairs, he turns around and tells the camera, “You should be filming the workshop…They’re trying to make a deal with the boss,” thereby breaking the fourth wall in a way previously unseen in Youth. Another male worker talks to Wang about injustices back home for an extended period, while watching a movie on his laptop at night in his dormitory. Once again, Wang has chosen to widen his focus to that of the group instead of following one protagonist; although there was a sense of labor organizing in Spring, Youth (Hard Times) shows the workers turning up the heat on the bosses. 

The disorganization and messy chaos of the factories in Hard Times prove that the train can’t stay on the tracks this way forever. When a man loses his notebook that logs his hours worked, he won’t be paid; the bosses don’t keep formal records of who works when, and they aren’t willing to accept pictures of the notebook on his phone. Most of the workers are in their early twenties, but some are older, bringing their children and aging parents into work with them. The young people are the ones driving the change, despite the larger economic forces pushing them back toward compliance with the crowd. “Have money, get girl. No money, no life,” one man laments in a way that succinctly expresses the larger predicament of the worker, without explicitly naming larger forces like capitalism. 

While much of the 227-minute runtime is dedicated to the minutiae of factory work—the humming of the sewing machine is as prevalent as ever—Wang takes us out of the workplace more than he did with Spring. In contrast to the cramped, dirty Zhili province, Bing follows workers to expansive green landscapes as they return home to their families for New Year’s. An introductory image of one of the workers’ fathers greeting him with fireworks has stayed in my mind for its kindness. Another shot shows a man playing acoustic guitar on a train. Through the power of these images, Wang affords the workers a gentle dignity in a way that they may not experience in their daily working lives. 

Director: Wang Bing 
Release Date: September 28, 2024 (New York Film Festival)

Brooklyn-based film writer Katarina Docalovich was raised in an independent video store and never really left. Her passions include sipping lime seltzer, trying on perfume and spending hours theorizing about Survivor. You can find her scattered thoughts as well as her writing on Twitter.