“You have no rights! So what’s the point of having money?” — Hu Siwen, migrant garment worker

Dingy sweatshops. Hard-nosed bosses. Young people crammed into bare-bones accommodations. The ever-present hum of industrial sewing machines.

YOUTH (HARD TIMES) is the second installment in Chinese director Wang Bing’s monumental series chronicling the lives of migrant garment workers — some as young as 15 — in the Zhili district of Huzhou City. Wang immerses himself in the lives of these workers, as they try to find potential dates, negotiate better piece-work rates with bosses, and sew, sew, sew, everything from padded jackets, to jeans, to pillows.

Life seems hard, but stable. Then, a workshop owner brutally beats an employee and flees. With no boss and no pay, the workers organize to sell the shop’s sewing machines and pocket the money.

There are 300,000 migrant garment workers from surrounding provinces in Zhili, and while YOUTH (HARD TIMES) captures a sense of their struggles, it also highlights a growing solidarity. But the workers also recognize — as the film’s sole interview makes clear — that ultimately they are up against the forces of capital and the state, and those forces won’t hesitate to crush them if it thinks they are getting too far out of line.

Intimate and evocative, YOUTH (HARD TIMES) is a striking portrait of young lives in an alien environment that's radically different from the rural homes so many of them come from.

“Delivers a thorough cinematic vision with a precise political edge. The documentary serves an ode to worker solidarity and mobilisation. Wang’s powerful second instalment effectively uses cinéma vérité as more than just an observational storytelling tool. Instead, his presence serves as an active commentator on the systemic injustices at play.” —POV Magazine

“Pointed and purposeful, both in its scope and its techniques... Along the way, Wang captures the kind of camaraderie and interpersonal drama that makes it worth the wait.” —Siddhant Adlakha, Variety

“Wang’s work has never shied away from criticizing a modern, consumerist nation for failing to live up to the supposed socialist ideals of its revolution, but rarely has one of his films so nakedly called out the collusion between state and commerce to ensure the powerlessness of average citizens.” —Jake Cole, Slant

“A hallmark of Wang’s work is the discomfiting, shifting position in which he places the viewer. While watching HARD TIMES, I felt terribly helpless, hopeless, and sometimes angry at Wang for allowing us such intimate yet coolly distant access to misery; I also felt confided in, when subjects spoke directly to the camera about their lives…. Wang’s project reveals the monstrous production needed to sustain the ceaseless consumption promised by the ads overrunning our world.” —Devika Girish, Film Comment

“While there’s no replacement for watching Youth in its totality, if you only have time for one chapter, you should focus on Hard Times. Engaging, nuanced and far more contextual, it gives a much fuller picture of the inevitable bleak fate of these resource-poor migrants, with little to sell but their youth.” —Karen Ma, easternKicks