Charlie Chaplin’s frantic production-line factory worker in Modern Times is a ghostly presence in this giant, immersive documentary from Chinese director Wang Bing, the movie equivalent of a wall-sized tapestry; it is about the sweatshop capital of China, the northern town of Zhili in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, known as the “city of children’s clothing”. Thousands of workshops turn out mountains of cheap garments and every year vast numbers of young people from about 16 to 22 come from outlying cities to do a season of brutally hard work in return for cash in hand.
This is China’s hop picking or kibbutzim, the young workers often staying in the grim dorms the bosses offer rent free to justify low pay. There are bricks of cash to be seen in this film, no question of internet bank transfers and perhaps the whole thing happens without the involvement of the tax collector.
Wang has already made a similar film about migrant factory workers called Bitter Money, and there are some spectacularly grim vistas in Youth: the main street of Zhili is a brutalist concrete avenue which eerily extends to the far horizon like something from a sci-fi movie (or perhaps something by Roy Andersson). The dorms themselves are squalid and cramped. But the first thing that strikes you about the workers is their energy, verve, humour and their hopefulness. Their “youth”, as in the film’s title, is not ironic: they are not, as I suspected they might be, prematurely aged by work (although the incessant wrangling about piecemeal rates of pay is clearly taking its toll by the end).
