‘Youth: Homecoming’ Review: Director Wang Bing Shines A Light On Workers Whose Lives Nobody Would Want — Venice Film Festival

Fiercely independent Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing spent five years filming young workers in Zhili, an industrial region near Shanghai where around 18,000 garment workshops churn out cheap clothes for the domestic market. The workshops run on cheap labor from the provinces; around 200,000 make the long trek from their home villages for six-month periods, living in the workshop dormitories and working 15-hour days. They are only  paid at the end of each six-month bout and have no idea how much they will get; the wages are calculated on piece-work rates so depend on how many units they turn out of their sewing machines, but also on sales, cash flow and their bosses’ whims. Often enough, it seems, they get next to nothing.

Director Wang followed a small group of workers, widening his scope to include friends and siblings who joined them in Zhili over the years, filming them at work and in the few hours they have between shifts. Open to anything, including several days on a crowded train, or nights in filthy, permanently freezing dormitories where everyone wears two puffer jackets just to survive, he accumulated 2,600 hours of film. This was then divided into three long films, of which Youth: Homecoming is the third. The previous editions, Spring and Hard Timeshave won numerous prizes.

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Make no mistake: these films are not entertainment. They are an act of enormous respect, in which we as viewers are privileged to participate in lives nobody would want, but which are the only prospect for hundreds of millions of people. That is arguably a dubious privilege. Watching these young folk tramp between sweatshops looking for work, scoffing pot noodles standing up in fly-blown kitchens because there is no room to sit or pushing unidentifiable bits of garments through sewing machines at what seems to be a superhuman pace, you just want to get out of there. As do they: the urgency of the holidays, their only respite given they work seven days a week, is palpable.

Not that there is a Shangri-la waiting for these kids. Even for those who manage to wheedle enough money out of their employers to afford a ticket home, there is just more hardship waiting: the train, hitching rides through perilous iced-over mountain roads — Dong Minyang’s journey home to Yunnan takes four days — threadbare houses almost as squalid as the dorms, parents starting to get ill, snow everywhere. During the new year’s break, Shi Wei gets married and there is a traditional exchange of gifts between the families. As one might expect, there are small envelopes of money, but mostly they give each other more puffer jackets. Needs must.

It isn’t all misery; in fact, these people are so stoic and their expectations so low that they manage to stay cheerful most of the time. Cold, mud and a broken-down car notwithstanding, that wedding is actually a truly joyous sequence. Shi Wei and his bride met in Zhili but come from nearby villages in remote Yunnan, so both bride and groom are surrounded by rambunctious friends letting off firecrackers and covering them with spray-on streamers. They seem bigger people here, less careworn; it is often startling to see how Wang’s subjects age over the five years he follows them.

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There is a lot of camaraderie in adversity, too. Playing cards, bantering with each other mercilessly, the young men in the dormitory could be schoolboys were it not for the moldy walls and rubbish on the floors. Wang also spends a long spell in a workshop where there is no supervisor and the young people laugh, flirt and boast of how many hundred bits of whatsit they have managed to complete that day with what seems to be genuine pride.

Even so, it makes for grueling viewing. There is no eye candy on offer. Everything here is shot handheld, with the camera often coming in the wake; we see a lot of backs of heads. Indoor spaces are cramped and crowded, so the camera has to be squeezed wherever it will fit; there is no room for any kind of style. We often have little sense of what is being said, because Wang’s method means that he catches scraps of conversation and rarely intervenes or questions anyone directly. It is documentary in the raw. It feels rough, but hugely valuable.

Title: Youth: Homecoming
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: Pyramide International
Director: Wang Bing
Running time: 2 hr 32 mins