The first part of the Youth trilogy follows a group of textile workers that, each year, leave their rural villages and migrate to the manufacturing city of Zhili. They work for long hours and sleep in shared, inhospitable dorms.

Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy focuses on the lives of a group of young textile workers who, each year, leave their rural villages and migrate to the manufacturing city of Zhili, 150 kilometers from Shanghai. Wang’s observational approach and the amount of footage filmed (over 2,600 hours in a period of five years for the entire trilogy) allow him to build documentaries in which the experience of place and time is paramount. Despite its seemingly formless objectivity, Wang creates – across the total length of Youth – variations on motifs that, ultimately, become quite poetic.

In Youth (Spring), the first installment of the trilogy, we are taken into independent workshops and inhospitable dorms shared by the workers. We see them performing repetitive tasks with sewing machines for long hours. We see them joking, fighting, flirting, remembering, planning – discussing the latest iPhone, making online purchases, eating take-away noodles, falling in and out of love, re-negotiating piece-work rates… It is impossible not to recognise the socio-economic conditions that heavily shape their lives; but Wang’s miracle in Spring consists in showing how, even in a society where productivity reigns and imposes its enslaving conditions, life – nonetheless – happens.