Youth - Spring (2023) (The dGenerate Films Collection)

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YOUTH (SPRING) is a documentary driven by the thrum of industrial sewing machines ― just like the lives of the young garment workers it portrays. The town of Zhili, about 95 miles from Shanghai, is a center for the children’s garment industry. Workers in their teens and early twenties come from surrounding provinces to live in factory dorms and spend their days sewing clothes. In a remarkably intimate documentary filmed over five years, acclaimed filmmaker Wang Bing takes us into these independent workshops. A successor to his 2017 film BITTER MONEY, YOUTH (SPRING) is not an exposé of the garment industry. Instead, the audience is drawn into the lives of the young workers. Like so many of us, they’re doing the best they can in a tough environment.