YOUTH (HOMECOMING)
青春：归
WATCH
Minutes:
160
Director:
Wang Bing
Documentary
2024
|
France, Luxembourg, Netherlands
Institutional
Trailer
Chinese w/ English subtitles
Work in the garment factories of Zhili, where some 300,000 migrants from rural China sew clothing, is winding down for the season. Finally, the incessant hum of sewing machines fades away. Now it’s time for the workers to try and convince their managers to pay them so they can return home for New Year celebrations.
YOUTH (Homecoming) is the final installment in Wang Bing’s ambitious trilogy on the young workers of Zhili, shot over five years. But in contrast to the previous films, here Wang focuses more closely on a handful of characters. We follow them on their journeys back to their families, riding packed trains and negotiating perilous mountain roads. Back home, the factories of Zhili seem far away, as Shi Wei and another young worker, Fang Lingping, celebrate weddings.
After the holidays end, the newlyweds and other workers head back to Zhili. YOUTH is a fitting end to the series — a quieter and more intimate film, and a powerful record of the unseen young labor force that drives garment production at a steep personal cost.
World Premiere, Venice Film Festival 2024
Toronto Film Festival 2024
New York Film Festival 2024
YOUTH (HOMECOMING)
YOUTH (HOMECOMING)
“Throughout his trilogy, Wang Bing’s modus operandi has been expansion through repetition, a recursive exploration of similar spaces that nevertheless exhibits differing emotions, concerns, and personalities. In doing so, and in spending so much time with his remarkable, downtrodden subjects, he does a great deal to reconfigure what the concept of home means; utilizing previous structural strategies before breaking away once again perfectly embodies the dynamic of continual reconsideration endemic to their experiences.”
Slant
“A wondrously insightful dilution of a generation caught on the periphery of industrialisation… After almost half a decade of conversations and observations, it is oddly lovely that Bing finds his conclusion far away from Zhili’s churning hub, tracing long winding threads to off-road villages. YOUTH (HOMECOMING) is about connection and conflict, a long-form homage to all the things that pushed us away from the family home and all the things that draw us back.”
Little White Lies
“A social and generational fresco, one that requires a commensurate set of subjects. As in his two previous entries, Wang looks for narrative echoes, seeing questions from one vignette resolve themselves much later in another… The young migrants wrestle with filial responsibility for those they must support, and they look queasily towards their own futures, wondering what kind of joy could Happiness Road afford to a child.”
Indiewire
“A genuinely sorrowful film about how deeply the churn of industry has worked its way into people's bones… [YOUTH (HOMECOMING)], captures workers as they attempt to escape the grasp of capitalist drudgery, which has so molded and contorted them, that it may as well be a part of their very beings.”
Variety