Youth (Hard Times)

Director: Wang Bing

2024 / 227min / DCP

Its title evoking, fittingly, Charles Dickens’s tale of grinding life in a Victorian English textile mill town, the second episode of Wang’s trilogy takes us into the summer months in Zhili’s crowded, cluttered sweatshops, when tempers flare, bank accounts dwindle, and whispers among the laborers packed into the dormitories along Happiness Road concerning unfit working conditions, managerial malfeasance, and unionization rise to a desperate din. A film of massive scope but extraordinary precision, its keenly observed vignettes of interpersonal tension and against-all-odds comradeship building to a masterfully orchestrated climax.

Director Wang Bing in-person for a Q&A on Sunday, October 20th