Complete Wang Bing Trilogy Pass
$40 for Public • $35 FilmScene members • $25 for students
"[An] immersive, 3.5-hour opus."—indieWire
"Consistently engaging. Like Frederick Wiseman, Wang is a lofty filmmaking doc deity who moves in mysterious, glacial ways, but one who sometimes performs miracles."—The Hollywood Reporter
"Wang’s micro portraits add up to a larger canvas on which the dreams and hopes of an entire toiling generation are outlined"—Vogue
In his monumental Youth Trilogy, filmmaker Wang Bing cements his status as "the most fearless chronicler of contemporary China" (Beijing Contemporary Arts Foundation). Over the course of his decades spanning career, Wang has become known for his expansive and muralistic documentation of China's dispossessed. Wang's curiosity explores the labor forces whose ambitious, but exploitative efforts, fuel the feverishly expansionist dreams of the national economy. For this trilogy, Wang amassed 2,600 hours of footage of young garment workers whose lives are seldom celebrated. Shot between 2014 and 2019, Wang points an unflinching camera at the unfair and predatory world of textile labor in the factories of Zhili province to create a titanic ten-hour trilogy.
In Youth (Spring), the first part of the trilogy, we first come to know Zhili, about 95 miles from Shanghai. A center for the children’s garment industry, workers in their teens and early twenties arrive from surrounding provinces to live in sparse, trash-strewn concrete dorms in the same buildings as the small factories where they spend their days sewing leggings, shorts, fluffy skirts, and jackets with Mickey Mouse hoods.
To honor his dedicated work, FilmScene will present Wang’s complete Youth Trilogy on three consecutive days. For anyone interested in contemporary observational cinema, the work is essential, and true devotees will have a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see his verité saga in a cinema.
