Youth (Homecoming)

Wang Bing concludes his monumental Youth trilogy in expansive fashion, giving ever-wider scope to the lives of migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories, which the filmmaker recorded over the course of five years. Centred around the New Year’s break, when the workers are planning to visit their families in remote hometowns to celebrate the festivities, Homecoming functions as a sweeping portrait of contemporary rural China, incorporating images of tightly packed trains and buses climbing treacherous mountainside roads and joyous interludes, including wedding celebrations for workers Shi Wei and Fang Lingping, into its scenes of factory life. Wang’s cyclical account of young people caught in constant survival mode comes to a poignant close here, giving definitive shape and meaning to his enormous act of observation. The middle chapter, Youth (Hard Times), also screens at Antenna this year; however, both films can be appreciated as standalone works.