‘Youth (Homecoming)’: Venice Review

Dir. Wang Bing. France/Luxembourg/Netherland. 2024. 152mins 

It’s business as usual in the workshops of Zhili in Youth (Homecoming), the final part of Wang Bing’s epic documentary trilogy about the Chinese garment trade at its most basic industrial level. Payment is uncertain, living conditions more than spartan, and an army of young workers face a worrying future. The difference in this episode is that subjects get to spend more time away visiting with their families – although the English title is ambiguous, since people always seem to return to the Zhili shopfloors, as if that was the real home they can never escape.

Wang’s brutally revealing trilogy presents a challenging statement about working-class life

Shot between 2014 and 2019, the exhaustive Youth project, running nearly 10 hours in total, concludes with the Venice Competition premiere of Homecoming, following chapters Spring (Cannes, 2023) and Hard Times (Locarno, 2024). Overall, the trilogy must stand as a monument in contemporary documentary, and will be much discussed by historians of the form – although the rigorous and deliberately repetitive, even monotonous elements of the project will require dedicated viewers to show a patience to match that of Wang and his crew. 

Where Hard Times focused on payment issues and the Zhili workforce as a collective, Homecoming very much allows individuals and couples to step into the spotlight, emerging as fully rounded figures away from the crushing environment of the workshops. The film’s long central section shows a number of workers returning home to different regions of the country to celebrate Chinese New Year. A young woman named Dong Minyan and her husband Mu Fei, both from China’s southwestern Yunnan province, are seen travelling on a train with corridors as cramped as the workplace they have left; en route, we sense their exhaustion.

We then meet Mu Fei’s father, recently diagnosed with TB, and mother, who breaks down in front of the camera, deeply distressed by the health and money problems the family face, in what is arguably the most directly emotive passage in the trilogy. Dong Minyan herself also talks directly to the person behind the camera, confessing her own despair; away from the crowds and corridors of Zhili, this episode really allows its subjects to open up.

Other sequences are more joyous, notably the wedding procession of another young couple complete with fireworks and uproarious bursts of foam spray, and a New Year ceremony in Anhui province (the caption ironically notes ‘New Year 2016 – Feast of the God of Prosperity’). Elsewhere, in a town near the Yangtze river, a family is seen dining under a prominent, and centrally placed, image of Chairman Mao, one of the only sequences in the trilogy where Wang is directly prompting us to think about the legacy of China’s modern history.

The party is over following the wedding banquet of another woman, Fang Lingping, whose husband accompanies her back to Zhili and himself enlists as a clothing worker, struggling to learn the techniques of production (the stresses between him and his more adept wife soon becoming evident). In this last hour of the film, we are back in the familiar, depressing city as a new young generation arrive looking for work: we quickly see their youthful high spirits subside as the film’s cyclical structure reasserts itself, echoing the relentless grind of Zhili’s soul-crushing machinery. 

There is very little overt commentary in the trilogy, other than laments from workers and their families about the difficulty of staying afloat. The West may choose to see Asia’s sweatshops as a special case situated in a world apart. But Wang’s brutally revealing trilogy presents a challenging statement about working-class life, urban and rural, and urges us to think about economic exploitation and the nature of labour in the globalised world.