‘Youth - Wang Bing’

Youth (Spring) was shot over the course of five years in the city of Zhili, 150 km from Shanghai. To this city dedicated to textile manufacturing, young people have migrated from all rural regions surrounding the Yangtze Delta in search for a way to sustain themselves. They are in their early twenties, share dormitories and eat in the corridors. They work tirelessly to be able one day to raise a child, buy a house or set up their own workshop. Between them, friendships and love affairs are made and unmade according to the seasons, bankruptcies and family pressures. Wang Bing condensed 2,600 hours of footage into a three-and-a-half-hour mosaic of 20 minute segments of toiling young lives. 

Wang Bing is a filmmaker from China who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1996. At the turn of the century, Wang Bing made film history when he boarded a goods train with a small DV camera and started filming the industrial district of Tiexi in northeast China. In each case, his films emerge from encounters with people on the margins of 21st-century Chinese society.