Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy

Shot between 2015 and 2019 in the textile factories of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in northern Zhejiang province, which rely on the grueling labor of hundreds of thousands of young migrant workers drawn from the provincial countryside, Wang’s Youth Trilogy is a verité saga exploring the individual toll of contemporary China’s ambitious, relentless economic expansion, depicting—with unfailing empathy for its subjects—the rising tensions between rank-and-file laborers and their management, the glaring disparity between official prosperity and individual deprivation, and the moving endurance of solidarity and aspiration in the face of a system that sows division. An epochal, career-defining work of “21st-century turbo-capitalism captured with the spirit of 19th-century social realism” from “China’s foremost cine-sociologist.” [Sight & Sound]