Complete Wang Bing Trilogy Pass
$40 for Public • $35 FilmScene members • $25 for students
Presented by
Bread Garden Market and Little Village Magazine
Sunday, December 1, 7pm
DIALOGUE: Filmmaker Wang Bing in person
The Vino Vérité series features talented new voices and established filmmakers influenced by the vérité tradition in person to present their thought-provoking, chance-taking, and visually-arresting films. Each selection is paired with hand-selected wines from Bread Garden Market.
Tickets: $25 public / $20 members / $12 students. Includes wine tasting, film, hors d'oeuvres and filmmaker reception.
6:30 Hors d'oeuvres & wine tasting
7:00 Screening
9:30 Q&A + Reception with filmmaker, wine and dessert
"Mr. Wang sits at the pinnacle of the Chinese documentary groundswell."—The New York Times
"In his immense documentaries, Wang depicts the lives of Chinese people with intricate and unsparing detail."—Aperture
"In the films of Chinese documentarian Wang Bing, time expands to such leviathan extremes they make you feel as though you've been forced into a staring contest with reality. Even at their most static, his images vibrate with a corrosive, pent-up energy, intensified by the sense that much of the marginal, rural, and post-industrial life they capture is in the process of vanishing."—Film Comment
ABOUT YOUTH (HOMECOMING)
In his monumental Youth Trilogy, filmmaker Wang Bing cements his status as "the most fearless chronicler of contemporary China" (Beijing Contemporary Arts Foundation). Over the course of his decades spanning career, Wang has become known for his expansive and muralistic documentation of China's dispossessed. Wang's curiosity explores the labor forces whose ambitious, but exploitative efforts, fuel the feverishly expansionist dreams of the national economy. For this trilogy, Wang amassed 2,600 hours of footage of young garment workers whose lives are seldom celebrated. Shot between 2014 and 2019, Wang points an unflinching camera at the unfair and predatory world of textile labor in the factories of Zhili district to create a titanic ten-hour trilogy.
Wang concludes the trilogy with YOUTH (HOMECOMING), an expansive encounter of the migrant workers in Zhili’s textile factories as they plan to visit their hometowns to celebrate the New Year’s festivities.
To honor his dedicated work, FilmScene will present Wang’s complete Youth Trilogy on three consecutive days. For anyone interested in contemporary observational cinema, the work is essential, and true devotees will have a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see his verité saga in a cinema.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Wang Bing was born in 1967 in Xi’an in the Chinese province of Shaanxi. He studied photography and cinematography at Beijing Film Academy, and begun his career as an independent filmmaker in 1999. His debut film that lasted over six hours, and his durational documentary West of the Tracks (Tiexi qu) won the Grand Prix at the Marseille Festival of Documentary Film and became an international success. Wang's work is deeply rooted in China’s social and cultural history, with a contemporary focus on the working class populating remote and marginalized regions. A relentless chronicler of a transforming modern Chinese society, Wang has amassed hundreds of thousands of hours of footage during his monumental career, often serving as the primary cameraman and with intimately minimal crews. His durational cinema and installation work has been internationally acclaimed and selected in the Cannes Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam. He has been honored with retrospectives at Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique in Brussels and as the Eye Art & Film Prize Laureate at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. His unflinching work has put him at odds with Chinese government censors, but working without subsidies or permits, he manages to avoid being silenced and maintain his artistic freedom.
AWARDS AND ACCLAIM FOR THE YOUTH TRILOGY
Cannes Film Festival (2023) — Palme d'Or nominee, Golden Eye nominee
Locarno Film Festival (2024) — Official Selection
Venice Film Festival (2024) — Official Selection
Toronto International Film Festival (2024) — Official Selection
New York Film Festival (2024) — Official Selection