Wang Bing

Brutality Factory

Modern China. On a bright sunny day, in a building site, an industrial complex is being deconstructed. Night falls. The ruins of the factory are empty and silent. Phantoms appear, voices are heard, telling their stories....From the anthology The State of the World.

Beauty Lives in Freedom

Gao Ertai (1931) is an artist, teacher, philosopher who, in the 1950s, was imprisoned in the Jiabiangou Labour Camp. The film works as a diptych with Fengming, the confessional story of another victim of reprisals, and closes a vast film series on those who disappeared.

Venice 70: Future Reloaded

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

Ta'ang

The Ta'ang or Palaung people, an ethnic minority living in the mountainous area between Myanmar's Kokang region and China's Yunnan province, have historically suffered many forced migrations due to war. When their survival is threatened again in 2015, thousands of them flee across the border. Filmmaker Wang Bing accompanies them and becomes a privileged witness to a human story that is both a modern reportage and a mythical epic.

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks

A detailed look at the gradual decline of Shenyang’s industrial Tiexi district, an area that was once a vibrant example of China’s socialist economy. But industry is changing, and the factories of Tiexi are closing. Director Wang Bing introduces us to some of the workers affected by the closures, and to their families.

The Ditch

The film focuses on the suffering of Chinese who were imprisoned in a forced labor camp called Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert in winter 1960 under Mao Zedong on the grounds that they were "rightist elements". The film tells of the harsh life of these men, who coped with physical exhaustion, extreme cold, starvation and death on a daily basis.

Youth (Spring)

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

1966, My Time in the Red Guards

More preoccupied with "history" than Wu's other works, My Time in the Red Guards is a record of his fascination with the missed moment, Mao's Cultural Revolution. In 1966, the Red Guards ironically represented the official avant-garde, a movement carried forward by youth determined to become heroes of the Revolution. Wu interviews people who had joined the Red Guards as high schoolers, most now successful professionals, some Party members. The miscalculations and cruelties of this extreme cultural campaign are spread out before us, detailed by personal recollection and further illustrated by old agit-prop newsreels. Misgivings and fond remembrance vie for position as the interviewees seem to confuse the nostalgia of youthful action with the excesses of historical fact.

'Til Madness Do Us Part

An insight into the everyday lives of 50 inmates of a mental institution in the Chinese province of Yunnan, who are there for killing someone, committing a crime against a public official, or have a developmental disability.

Fengming: A Chinese Memoir

The film consists almost entirely of an interview with the elderly He Fengming, recounting her experiences in post-1949 China.

Youth (Homecoming)

Wang Bing concludes his monumental Youth trilogy in expansive fashion, giving ever wider scope to the lives of migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories as they plan to go to their remote hometowns to visit their families and celebrate the festivities for New Year’s break.

The State of the World

Six directors, six independent films, six visions on the state of the world. Each carrying a unique and personal interpretation of a specific experience, their crossover creates new space for a dynamic and radical inquisitive reflection.

Man in Black

Wang Xilin, 86, is one of China's most important modern classical composers. During the Cultural Revolution he was the target of severe persecution, enduring beatings, imprisonment and torture. With excerpts from his Symphonies, he revisits for this film some of the horrifying events that still live on in his memory as testimony to an era that saw the dehumanization of the entire Chinese nation.

Bitter Money

In a fast growing city of East China, migrants have been arriving and living for a dream of a better life. But what they find there is little opportunities and poor living conditions that push people, even couples, into violent and oppressive relations. Xiao Min, Ling Ling and Lao Yeh are some of the characters of this bitter chronicle of today China.

Dead Souls

In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as ultra-rightists in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.

Tiananmen

It's 1949 and Tiananmen Square is a mess. Overgrown with weeds and thoroughly dilapidated it looks like hell, but it's where Chairman Mao wants to hold the Founding Ceremony for the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. And so TIAN AN MEN recounts the heroism, the struggle and the sacrifices of a People's Liberation Army unit as they...clean up and re-decorate the Tiananmen Gate? (Description by Subway Cinema)

Three Sisters

The masterful new documentary from Wang Bing is an intimate, observational portrait of a peasant family who eke out a humble existence in a small village set against the stunning mountain landscapes of China's Yunnan province.

Youth (Hard Times)

In this enveloping second part of the Youth trilogy, shot between 2015 and 2019, Wang Bing deepens his vérité portrait of a generation struggling to survive on meager wages amidst a nation’s economic expansion, emphasizing the distrustful, increasingly combative relationship between workers and management.

Mrs. Fang

In a quiet village in southern China, Fang Xiuying is sixty-seven years old. Having suffered from Alzheimer's for several years, with advanced symptoms and ineffective treatment, she was sent back home. Now, bedridden, she is surrounded by her relatives and neighbors, as they witness and accompany her through her last days.

15 Hours

The town of Zhili accounts for 80 percent of China's output of children's clothes. 15 Hours was shot in August 2016. Zhili, part of the city of Huzhou in the province of Zhejiang, is home to around 18,000 small factories for children's clothing, manned throughout the year by over 200,000 migrant workers. In the 1980s, Zhejiang saw the emergence of a private capital-based garment industry open to any and all operators prepared to invest in flexible business models based on mutual credit or leasing. This film documents one day in the lives of the workers of 68 Xisheng Road in Zhili.

Traces

Wang Bing filmed "Traces" in 2005, during the search for locations for his film "The Ditch", in former « labour camps » in the Gobi Desert, where thousand of political prisoners had died of hunger. For the first time, he used 35mm black and white film (a gift from artist Yang Fudong) to capture this landscape condemned to disappear. With no sound, the film records the final, barely visible traces of human lives: bones, clothing, footsteps... Drawing on experimental documentary, this short video echoes other subjects dear to Wang Bing : the story of the campaign against the « rightist elements » in the early 1950s and the reeducation and hard labour camps established before the Cultural Revolution. This film, which was not edited until 2014, was first presented at the Centre Pompidou the same year and then again at the Galerie Chantal Crousel in 2018.

Coal Money

On the coal road linking the Shanxi mines with the large port of Tianjin, in northern China, the drivers of 100-ton trucks shuttle endlessly to and from, day and night. On the roadside: prostitutes, cops, petty racketeers, garage owners, mechanics.

Crude Oil

Filmed in the Inner Mongolian portion of the Gobi Desert, this film follows a group of oil field workers as they go about their daily routine.

Man With No Name

The character of this story lives far from the worlds of the material and the spirit. He has built his own subsistence conditions. He often goes to the neighboring villages, although he doesn’t communicate with other people. He collects some waste but doesn’t beg. He prowls about the ruins of deserted villages, as an animal or as a ghost. Under double political and economical pressure, most of people are depriving of their last dignity into a world where it exists a lack of material and spirit. But a human being stays a human being. He is looking for reasons to continue to live. —Wang Bing

Tiexi District

"Tiexi District" documents the last day of the great socialist experiment, a sorrowful afternoon marked by scattered dishes and a sense of desolation. Looking at the impact of the decline of heavy industry on workers and their families in the Tiexi district of Shenyang, China, at the turn of the 21st century, documented unflinchingly by a fly-on-the-wall camera.