Youth (Spring) Is a Remarkably Intimate and Empathetic Look at Chinese Garment Workers

In a year awash with films testing viewers’ attention spans and bladder control, Chinese documentarian Wang Bing’s vibrant masterpiece Youth (Spring) just may be the season’s fleetest three-hour-plus movie.

The film ventures deep inside the grinding maw of independently run garment workshops in Zhili, a town some 95 miles from Shanghai that’s a hub of the domestic children’s clothing industry. Young migrant workers, 300,000 strong and in their teens and 20s, arrive from the countryside to sleep in cluttered concrete dorms situated above the small factories where they spend their days sewing (with mind-boggling speed) embellished leggings, flouncy dresses, fleece-lined sweatpants, and jackets with Mickey Mouse hoods. The fastest workers churn out 700 items in a 13-hour day. The address of many of these workshops? The heaving-with-irony Happiness Road.

But this is no sweatshop exposé, nor a screed against the dehumanizing effects of industrial labor. On the contrary, the workers’ humanity emerges in splendid detail as Wang examines their daily lives, offering a rich glimpse of the newest generation of a country that’s been omnipresent in US news for at least the past two decades—but that most Americans still know shockingly little about.

Filmed between 2014 and 2019 and whittled from 2,600 hours of footage, the exceptionally intimate documentary premiered at Cannes earlier this year, the only Chinese-language film in competition and one that broke a 20-year drought of nonfiction films competing at the festival. (The last one was Michael Moore’s Palme d’Or winner Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004.) The director has said it’s the first of a trilogy that will together run some 10 hours.

The film is organized in blocks of 20 to 25 minutes, starting in the workshops, which number some 20,000 and on average have fewer than 20 workers each. Against the deafening thrum of machinery (and blaring pop music, presumably to keep the workers awake) are petty scuffles, childish horseplay, and coy flirting. They smoke, chatter, and boast, their hands a flurry of activity at sewing machines all the while. Eventually economic realities come to the fore as the low-wage laborers organize to press their less-than-amenable bosses for more pay. (Wages are computed on a per-piece basis and paid out every six months; workers don’t know the rate of each item until the end.)

Wang then moves upstairs into their dingy and seemingly unheated (going by the coats they never take off) living quarters. There, in their precious few off-hours, the workers take turns in the shared washrooms; hastily slurp bowls of cheap noodles; exhaustedly scroll on their smartphones; have romantic assignations; and engage in the stray cake fight. Like mercurial young people the world over, they fuck around.

Photo: Courtesy Icarus Films

At the close of garment-making season, the film trails one worker back to the lush greenery of his home province of Anhui, where most of the film’s subjects hail from; the sequence offers an oasis following hours spent half buried in hulking piles of fabric and industrial detritus.

There’s no protagonist or handful of characters to follow. New faces are continuously introduced, but each person is handled with integrity and respect during their brief time onscreen. And there’s no exposition or really even a clear narrative; the exchange of a few words captures a worker’s essence before the film moves on.

But underneath the casual banter and mundane daily dramas is the sense of a larger shift. The flow of young migrant workers like the ones seen here has shaped the country’s urban and rural areas since the 1990s: They travel to big cities for work in the spring and return in winter for Chinese New Year, leaving their hometowns empty save for the elderly and children for most of each year. Taken in aggregate, Wang’s micro portraits add up to a larger canvas on which the dreams and hopes of an entire toiling generation are outlined. To say that their destinies are intertwined with our own here in the West may be overstating it—but it seems essential to learn about and pay attention to our Chinese counterparts. Ten hours may not even be enough.

Youth (Spring) opens Friday at Metrograph in New York City, with upcoming screenings at Acropolis Cinema (LA), Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), and the Roxie Theater (San Francisco).