Youth (Spring)
Jan. 18, 2025
CAMP Rooftop
by Wang Bing
232 mins | 2023
6:30 pm*
Note* film starts earlier than usual, at 6:30pm, on account of its runtime. There will be a short interval with food.
This short :) Wang Bing film follows 17 to 20-year old garment workers over several years, in what feels simultaneously like a familiar place, like say the garment factory in Prateek Vats' Jal Tu Jalaal Tu or the basement Karkhanas in Shaina Anand's Khirkeeyaan , and also an unfamiliar one. As if you have travelled to the next factory town, and space and time has evolved society into a surprisingly different version. Bing is a patient, if not the most patient, observer, editor and show-er of this world. With a capacity to stay and in this case, with Youth.
In 2014, as part of Rivers without Banks, a season of long films at CAMP, we saw his debut film, the nine-and-a-half-hour-long West of the Tracks, 2003, set in the heavy-industry Teixi district of Shenyang at the cusp of the millennium and at a time of decline of a socialist era of industrial production. It was an afternoon, evening and then night as the film moved outdoors, and it had the gentle power of observation that had deep and lingering interest in its world. Wang Bing is aware of the problem of speaking for others, but takes it on in its fullness. His gaze and edit is that of a "nearby" comrade, guiding the transmission of such experiences, that then we are all asked to partake in.
Two decades and a prolific filmography later, Wang Bing gives us Youth. Part 1 - Spring, that premiered at Cannes in 2023 where it competed for the Palme d'Or, rare for a documentary film. The Youth trilogy was filmed between 2014 and 2019 in Zhili, 90 minutes from Shanghai and home to a garment industry of 20,000 small-scale stitching units making children's clothing. It had 2,600 hours of footage, and took a pandemic to edit into film.
See you there!
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