Going up against the heavyweights
China’s foremost documentary maker Wang Bing says he is puzzled by the Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes for his ‘small’ film on sweatshop workers in the garment industry
When Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang Bing heard that his new film Youth (Spring) had been selected for main competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it was a case of mixed emotions.
“I didn’t really have high hopes we’d get in, so I was quite surprised,” the 55-year-old says.
“I’m a little puzzled by the whole thing. Because I consider this really quite a small film. All the rest are huge-budget, big-star blockbuster movies, it seems!”
By “all the rest’’, he’s referring to most of the other nominees – films like Henry VIII period drama Firebrand with Jude Law and Alicia Vikander, or Todd Haynes’ May December with Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman – that will compete for the festival’s prestigious top prize, the Palme d’Or, awarded this Saturday.
There aren’t really any “blockbusters” in competition, but next to Wang’s exhaustive look at the garment factory workforce in Zhili City, Zhejiang province, they must seem like it.
Wang began the film in 2014; he has since released seven films, including Eastern China immigrant story Bitter Money (2016) and the eight-hour historical documentary Dead Souls (2018).
Shooting “on and off” until 2019, during which time he filmed over 2,600 hours of material, Youth (Spring) is positively brisk by comparison to much of his work, running at a mere 3½ hours.
Set in small workshops, where twenty-somethings toil in relentless shifts, Wang’s camera dispassionately observes the gruelling, unforgiving nature of this work.
His reason for making the film was socio-economic, it seems. For the past 30 years, Wang has watched people from rural China gravitate towards industrial centres to find work. “That was a good enough reason to start with, to capture that world,” he says.
But it was only when he visited Zhili City, about 240km from Shanghai, that he found his setting.
“Most of the places I could have gone to try to film this floating population, working in industrial centres, I wouldn’t have been able to get access or even permission because they are vast, closely managed and surveilled factories.”
While he was allowed to shoot in these cramped workspaces across Zhili City – the equivalent of a honeycomb, he says – it was by no means easy.
“It’s all machines back-toback, the alleys are narrow. You cannot move around, whereas in most of my other films, I am used to having a lot of free movement.
“In this case, I felt claustrophobic, awkward and cramped. Move an inch left or right, you hit a workbench, table or machine. It took me three or four months before I started feeling more or less comfortable in that environment.”
Even then, he had to endure the constant noise of the machines and loud music.
Somehow, through all this, Wang manages to unearth human stories behind these worker bees. Early on, we meet 19-year-old Shengnan, who is pregnant by her boyfriend Zu Guo. With an abortion in the offing, her bosses seem more concerned with the completion of her quota at work than the urgent medical procedure.
Later, one of the managers yells at his workforce that “a preschooler could do a better job” when it’s discovered that there’s a discrepancy in the endless garments being produced. “It is brutal, and in Chinese society, I’m afraid, quite a lot of people have that attitude,” Wang says.
The film contains moments of levity, not least a food fight with cake splattered all over the workers’ faces, and Wang smartly captures the camaraderie that exists.
“I really felt these people are good to each other,” he says. “But at the same time, you could say they’re the tools of society. Whose tools are they exactly, I couldn’t say. But those are things I very rarely discuss with them. Because actually I didn’t want to interfere.
“I feel a bit embarrassed [and] bad about intervening and discussing their lives with them. So 99 per cent of the time, I was content. I just wanted to stand there, to one side, and capture it and not ask those questions.”
Whether that will satisfy all viewers remains to be seen. As the review in entertainment newspaper Variety noted, Wang’s “strictly non-interventionist approach … means we have only an incomplete picture of their dilemma”, an argument that holds some weight.
But then perhaps it’s too much to expect his sleep-deprived subjects, working 15-hour shifts before crashing in nearby rundown dorms, to offer a broad analysis of their place in China’s enormous workforce.
Largely, the filmmaker focuses on the minutia of their daily lives; the dreams they have are modest, from having children or opening up their own small factory.
There’s no judgment from Wang, or indeed any wider context about where the garments end up, or the morals of people buying clothes made in “sweatshop” environments where the employees are paid a pittance.
“I didn’t have any preconceptions,” he says. “I didn’t think of it that way. I just saw that this was a reality that was there, these hundreds of thousands of tiny places that were more or less the same size. There were enough difficulties – it would have made it harder if I’d had preconceptions.”
Partly, the film is only possible because of lightweight digital camera technology, a far cry from when he started making documentaries like 2003’s nine-hour opus West of the Tracks, a look at the decline of Shenyang’s industrial Tiexi district.
“In the old days, it was quite difficult to get very close to people and film them more closely and intimately. But with digital handheld cameras, it’s much easier to get close to them. I wanted to give the recording function of the camera its full potential.”
For sure, Youth (Spring) maintains Wang’s reputation as China’s foremost documentary filmmaker, something the Cannes Film Festival has recognised. He even has another hour-long documentary, Man in Black, about the 86-year-old Chinese composer Wang Xilin, at the festival, something he’s more at ease with.
It is brutal, and in Chinese society, I’m afraid, quite a lot of people have that attitude
WANG BING
It’s all machines back-to-back, the alleys are narrow. You cannot move around
WANG BING
“I feel it’s much more appropriate, less surprising and somehow fits better that Man in Black should be chosen for a Special Screening, out of competition,” he says, modestly. “It feels justified.”
Part performance art piece, part character study, Man in Black was filmed in 2022 in a deserted Paris theatre as the composer performs and talks about his life.
During the Cultural Revolution, he endured persecution, beatings, imprisonment and torture, which accounts for why Wang shot his subject fully naked.
“This man, in his career, his whole life long, he was a target of hatred and criticism and the way they found to punish him for his views was physical,” he says.
“The marks of the suffering he’s lived through are born on his body. The scars are visible to see and that’s what I wanted everyone to see.”