‘Youth (Spring)’ Review: Filmmaker Wang Bing Takes Audiences on a Long-Winded but Illuminative Journey Through Chinese Textile Workshops in His Latest Documentary
Courtesy of Icarus Films.
While the world has been warned of the adverse effects of the fast fashion business for thirty-odd years now, the endless crusade for trend-driven clothing at low prices continues to fuel millions of shoppers every year, upholding the wasteful and exploitative practices developed around the mass manufacturing of apparel. Despite the fast fashion industry's reputation for worker mistreatment and environmental contamination, modern consumers can still disassociate from their contributions to the business, resulting in companies like Shein and H&M being valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. With his latest work, Youth (Spring), documentarian Wang Bing bypasses the typical media headlines associated with Chinese textile workshops to introduce audiences to a facet of the industry that usually goes unnoticed: the vibrant and full-of-life young folks that are often employed at such places. Filmed from 2014 to 2019, Youth (Spring) studies several textile workshops and their employees, capturing their highs and lows in a workplace that completely erases the boundary between work and life outside of it.
Youth (Spring) avoids any conventional exposition employed by documentaries in the form of talking heads or extensive intertitles, instead dropping the viewer directly into a cramped and cluttered workshop where employees are churning out garments with incredible velocity, their conversations muffled by the background noise of pop music and the clamorous sounds of sewing machines. The documentary shifts its focus back and forth between many subjects, mostly aged from their late teens to early thirties, all of whom are simply introduced with a title card that includes their name, age, and hometown (Hu Zuguo, 19, from Xuancheng, Anhui Province, for example). Taking an observational, almost invisible perspective, Bing's camera follows its subjects from their workrooms to their dormitory-style living quarters, which are often mere yards away from their sewing machines, one floor up or down from the workshops. Sewing for long hours with intense quotas to make ends meet financially, the workers live nearly their entire lives inside the confines of these textile factories, fighting, falling in and out of love, and navigating the initiations of adulthood within the limits of their all-encompassing jobs.
Courtesy of Icarus Films.
Youth (Spring) was filmed in the city of Zhili, one of China's epicenters for textile manufacturing just over 100 miles from Shanghai. Litter-strewn streets and sad, gray blocks of buildings reminiscent of high Communism epitomize the cityscape and neighborhood where the textile workshops are located, most of which share a street ironically called Happiness Road. The documentary mainly captures the city from the breezeways of the workshop facilities where their employees take in the winter air, hang their laundry, and dispose of their trash, emphasizing the confinement of the workers within their windowless and fluorescent-lit sewing rooms. As Bing's handheld camera tracks its subjects from their sewing machines to their quarters, the viewer is introduced to a whole other level of the decrepitness of their existence: peeling paint, disheveled dorms, and shared bathrooms sans hot water provide the only spaces of respite from their taxing and repetitive work.
Throughout Youth (Spring)'s lengthy runtime, Bing invites viewers to become immersed in the interpersonal relationships built by his subjects in their workplace. Constantly flirting with one another, always on their cell phones, these young people feel no different from the ones you would find across many places worldwide. The employees face the universal challenges of maturing into adulthood: growing financial savings, navigating heartbreak, and planning their futures outside their workplace limitations. An early scene in the documentary captures a discussion between a young woman, her family, and her employer as they scheme up a plan to either get married to her beau (who she works with) or undergo an abortion. This extended sequence plays out with a powerful cultural contextualization, speaking to the conflict between traditional and modern ideas about womanhood and family life. Youth (Spring) finds much of its meaningful influence in this manner of slipping back and forth between the existential dilemmas of its subjects and the confinement of their life in the textile workshops.
Courtesy of Icarus Films.
While the first part of the documentary focuses on setting the scene of life inside the sweatshops, Youth (Spring) turns its concentration to the financial exploitation of the workers during its latter half. Most of the employees are young, inexperienced, and sheltered by their rural upbringings before finding work in the textile industry. Bing emphasizes their marginalization as disposable laborers: their managers constantly remind them that they are easily replaceable contracted employees who can leave if they are dissatisfied with the factory conditions or payment. The workers meet and decide their approach to bargaining their wages with their bosses, which are frequently denied. Paid per garment, the workers' piecework on intricate winter jackets is 14.5¥, the equivalent of a paltry $1.99. The poor pay and demanding work comes at a significant cost, with the employees subconsciously manifesting their financial anxieties through practically every conversation in one way or another. Bing is able to gracefully navigate these overarching themes of economic instability among the different personalities that Youth (Spring) follows.
While Youth (Spring) serves as a singular "slice of life" documentary that platforms a group of exploited workers uncommonly explored on screen, it is a demanding work that requires the viewer to surrender to its experiential sensibilities. At over 3.5 hours in length, the documentary poses a challenge of endurance and patience with its protracted runtime. Bing's emphasis on the repetition of the mind-numbing sewing often features drawn-out scenes where the audience is just watching a worker toil away for minutes on end. The direction has a clear and powerful purpose in portraying the unseen life of these workers, but these convictions can still pose a difficult test for viewers with short attention spans. From a Chinese perspective, the varying backgrounds of the workers in Youth (Spring) likely add much understanding to the interactions they share, but Western audiences (myself included) may miss much of the cultural nuances captured through these subjects and their points of view.
Despite its formidable length, Youth (Spring) feels like a momentous documentary that pushes the limits of cinema with its observational perspective, which in turn presents audiences with a portrait of a world that we may feel utterly disconnected from as we engage with consumer culture every single day. Youth (Spring) was first introduced to the world at the 2023 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where it was one of two documentary works to compete for the Palme d'Or in the Official Competition, a section of the festival that historically shuns documentary filmmaking. The film then went on to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival this fall. Youth (Spring) will make its theatrical debut on Friday, November 10, with distribution handled by Icarus Films. Click here to find a screening near you.