Come to Stay: Wang Bing’s YOUTH Trilogy

‘Come to Stay’ is a new program series for longer format documentaries that explore current social conditions around the world. While these films serve as a reminder that we are not mere spectators of these realities in today’s globalized world, their duration also enables time and space to be experienced in new ways. More than two decades after his monumental West of the Tracks (China 2002), documentary filmmaker Wang Bing depicts the situation of young migrant workers in the Chinese textile industry in his epic YOUTH trilogy. Between 2014 and 2019, he and his team shot around 2,600 hours of footage in Zhili near Shanghai, where hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers from across the country sew children’s clothing in some 18,000 workshops. His non-judgmental observations of these living and working situations reveal how economic realities bring with them new forms of exploitation.

The three parts of YOUTH – SPRING, HARD TIMES and HOMECOMING – premiered in the competitions of the Cannes, Locarno and Venice film festivals respectively and can now be seen for the first time as a trilogy in Berlin. (Birgit Kohler)