Dead Souls

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2010, while he was filming "Three Sisters" in the mountain of Yunnan province, Wang Bing met two teenagers, Yonggao and Yongjin, whose father, a stonemason, had gone to the city in the hope of finding work. Wang Bing met up with them again in 2014, when they had been reunited with their father after four years in Fumin. For about a month, Wang Bing filmed their daily lives in the single squalid room that was their home. The fixed camera recorded the micro-events that punctuated their days : their father leaving for work, the youngsters themselves waking up, breakfast time, in front of the television, etc.

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.

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.

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.