Youth (Spring)

Not with one film, but with two films, Wang Bing broke a five-year silence at Cannes earlier this year - exceptionally long for a director who spent the previous ten years delivering an average of one documentary a year. Thanks to features like West of the Tracks and Fengming, a Chinese Memoir, he is one of this century's most acclaimed documentarians. The two new films, Man in Black and Youth (Spring) confirm that reputation. In the latter, filmed over a six-year period, Wang offers a look at the gruelling work of employees of China's clothing-manufacturing workshops. Most are relatively young rural workers who travel several thousand kilometres just to be exploited. With a sense of detail, Wang films their labour-ridden lives in his beloved fly-on-the-wall style. 2600 hours of footage have been boiled down to a three-and-a-half-hour epic.

“The three-and-a-half-hour Cannes competition entry from the renowned documaker Wang Bing embeds with garment workers essentially living in factories. Like Frederick Wiseman, Wang is a lofty filmmaking doc deity who moves in mysterious, glacial ways, but one who sometimes performs miracles.” - The Hollywood Reporter