Youth (Spring)—the first installment of Wang Bing’s larger project Spring—is a laborious film, in terms not only of its mammoth runtime of 212 minutes, but also of its subject matter: Chinese workshop labor. Wang has been charting how the Chinese economy affects people’s lives since his colossal first feature West of the Tracks in 2003. He got the idea for Spring after talking to some of the migrants he filmed in 2016’s Bitter Money, an aptly titled portrait of Chinese couples’ relationships gone sour due to poor economic conditions. Youth (Spring) continues Wang’s predilection for creating an account of larger communities through smaller portraits of individuals.
Divided into 12 parts, Youth (Spring) transports us into the lives of young migrant garment workers in China. We never hang onto any one protagonist in particular. More specifically, the film focuses on the Zhili region on the Yangtze Delta basin, just outside Shanghai (one of the richest cities in China), which is best known for producing the bulk of children’s clothing in China. China has the largest textile industry in the world, and the Zhili region is just one small part of that. Young people from all over more rural parts of China temporarily move to the Zhili region in the spring to work in the approximately 20,000 workshops there, in order to save money for their futures, and return home for the winter.
The Zhili region is unique for many reasons, one being the garment workers’ slightly higher levels of freedom than in other regions; we watch the young men and women tease, play, argue, fall in love, and fight for higher wages from their workshop managers. The workshops in the Zhili region are not owned by the state, meaning fewer workers and more independence. The workers are paid in cash every six months, and based on the amount of items that they make, so there is no way to know how much cash flow is coming in. The young men and women work from 8 AM to 11 PM, sometimes with no breaks and no days off.
Unless a lot of people suddenly become more invested in where our clothes come from and the everyday minutiae of the lives of the people who spend their days making endless piles of stuff, Youth (Spring) is not destined to be the blockbuster of the summer. Of course, that was never Wang’s intention. One could deride Youth (Spring) as overly repetitive—seemingly endless—and that would be completely missing the point: Youth (Spring) is possibly the most significant document of Chinese garment workers ever created. Day in and day out, the workers repeat the same motion thousands of times, with only the sewing machines’ hum to listen to (unless they bring their own music, which they sometimes do). Wang has successfully captured the lives of people who have never been on screen before, and aren’t allowed to see their own film.
Wang’s signature style is remarkable because it is one of invisibility; nowhere is Wang’s presence felt in the film, and he prefers it that way. It’s not about him, and he doesn’t feel that his emotions or opinions on the subject matter are relevant to his cinematic expression. He presents his subjects as they are, without interference. Even though he has been making films for 20 years, there is no Wang “method” of filmmaking; he creates real relationships with the people in his films, which can take years. Youth (Spring) was filmed from 2014 to 2019, resulting in a stockpile of a whopping 2,600 hours of footage, which puts the three-and-a-half-hour runtime into perspective.
With the absence of a strong authorial voice, Wang invites his audience to think critically about what they’re witnessing during this time. I couldn’t stop thinking about global overconsumption and the amount of textiles that end up in landfills (26 million tons per year, according to a 2020 Bloomberg study). So much capital, so much hard work, so much youth is poured into so much waste, for such little gains for a small margin of people. It would be easy to become mired in negativity and feelings of meaninglessness, but Youth is a testament to the human spirit. Never sugar-coated or saccharine, Youth (Spring) shows the full spectrum of our experiences.
American journalists have been quick to center their interpretation of Youth (Spring) around American labor problems; at the Cannes press conference, Wang was asked for his opinions on the writers’ strike and on the influence of new AI technologies on labor (of course, neither subject comes up in the film). Wang’s responses were poised and well thought out—and he always returned to, and seemed genuinely interested in discussing, the lives of the people he filmed.
Director: Wang Bing
Release Date: May 18, 2023 (Cannes)
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.