A dizzying dive into the daily life of a textile town.
Zhili, 150 km from Shanghai. In this city dedicated to textile manufacturing, young workers come from all the rural regions crossed by the Yangtze River. They are in their early twenties, share dormitories and snack in the corridors. They work tirelessly to be able one day to raise a child, buy a house or set up their own workshop. Between them, friendships and love affairs are made and unmade according to the seasons, bankruptcies and family pressures.
In this first part of a planned trilogy, virtuoso director Wang Bing films the workers of a textile town. Their clean, swift gestures are repeated ad infinitum for tiny sums of money. They almost have the efficiency of machines, but the Chinese filmmaker places them in 3h35 of pure existence, punctuated by stories of love, illness, revolt and laughter.
Cinematographer
Maeda Yoshitaka
Xiaohui Shan
Yang Song
Xianhui Liu
Bihan Ding
Bing Wang
Sound
Ranko Paukovic
Production
Gladys Glover Films
House on Fire
CS Productions
Eastern-Lion Pictures and Culture Media Co.,
Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains
Golden Horse Award, Golden Horse Film Festival, 2023, tw
Independent/Experimental Film and Video Award, 2023, us
Wang Bing
Born in Xi’an in 1967, Wang Bing studied photography at the Shenyang Fine Arts School and then joined the Film Academy. In the 1990s, he earned his living as a cameraman and assistant. In 2002, he directed West of the tracks, a nine-hour documentary on the demise of a huge industrial zone in China. After that, he continued to tackle subjects that were difficult to say the least: “anti-Rightist” repression, extreme poverty, life in a psychiatric hospital… In 2017, he won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for Mrs. Fang. In 2021, the Cinémathèque française will devote a retrospective to his work. In 2023, the Cannes Film Festival presents two new films by the director in official selection: Spring in competition, and Man in Black in special screening.
