TIFF '24: Wang Bing completes the "Youth" Trilogy

by Cláudio Alves

YOUTH (HARD TIMES) won a special mention at Locarno, the Junior Jury and FIPRESCI prizes.

Last year, Wang Bing presented Youth (Spring) at TIFF after the film's world premiere in competition at Cannes. It was to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one of a magnitude that's impressive even for such a grand muralist as the director is known to be. His filmography is full of works documenting the Chinese dispossessed, often curious about the labor forces whose strenuous efforts make the national economy work its exploitative, feverishly expansionist dream. For Youth, he focused his camera on the greener workers, a new generation consigned to a life of unfair garment labor, struggling to survive within the putative economic boom of modern China. Wang shot it between 2014 and 2019, dividing his findings between three films that collectively amount to a nearly ten-hour-runtime. 

At The Film Experience, we've already gone over Spring, so it's time to tackle Hard Times – competition in Locarno – and Homecoming – an erstwhile Golden Lion contender from Venice. The cumulative effect of these three monuments of cinema cannot be overstated…

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TIFF '23: “Youth (Spring)” brings notes of optimism to Wang Bing’s cinema

by Cláudio Alves

Over a decade ago, Wang Bing’s first film explored the decline of an industrial district, state factories dying away as privately-owned businesses took over the Chinese economy. Since Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, the director has applied the same ‘fly on the wall’ technique to various other projects, each growing in size until his filmography resembles a collection of non-fiction epics. The 2002 picture clocked at over nine hours, edited down from 200 hours of footage. For his most recent endeavor, Wang recorded 2,600 hours of material, deciding to present it as a trilogy named after one of the most exploited demographic in the nation’s industry – Youth. The three-and-a-half-hour Youth (Spring) represents the first chapter in the director’s new opus, introducing new tonalities to his work…

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Cannes at Home: Day 3 – A Cinema of Violence

by Cláudio Alves

The third day of the festival, second day of competition screeners, brought with it our first big Cannes stinker of the year, as well as a potential prize magnet. Starting with the catastrophe, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Black Flies, which stars Sean Penn, incurred the wrath of many a critic. In more positive news, Chinese documentarian Wang Bing presented the first part of a tetralogy project (Youth or Spring are the alternate English language titles), a three-hour-plus epic of observational cinema concerning the lives of young laborers in China's garment industry. Could this be a significant contender for end-of-the-festival honors?

For the Cannes at Home project, let's consider how these two auteurs have dedicated much of their careers to depicting violence – Sauvaire the brutality of war and combat, Wang the horrors of exploitation. With that in mind, our films for today (both available to stream) are Johnny Mad Dog and Bitter Money…

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