‘Youth’ Review: Look Inside Chinese Sweatshops Is Long, Sobering – and Occasionally Fun
thewrap.comCannes Film Festival features an unusually robust selection of documentaries, two in the Main Competition alone, where nonfiction films almost never appear.
And if the ones that have screened in the festival’s first three days have anything in common, it’s scale. These docs go big, go long and go deep.The two that screened on Wednesday were Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City,” a four-hour tour of 130 different sites in that city, what happened there during World War II and what’s happening now; and Wim Wenders’ “Anselm,” which uses Wenders’ beloved 3D to create the enormous spaces in which German maximalist artist Anselm Kiefer creates his monumentally-scaled work.Thursday brought another entry in Cannes’ massive-doc sweepstakes.
Chinese director Wang Bing, who has two films in this year’s festival, is in the competition with “Youth,” a three-and-a-half hour look not at the carefree young people of his home country, but of the garment sweatshops where many of them toil.
The film is as exhausting as it is disturbing, and it’s relentlessness is in many ways the whole point as viewers spend 212 minutes looking at circumstances in which these young people, most in their late teens and early twenties, spend their daily lives. “Youth” was filmed over five years in the Chinese city of Zhili, which is home to more than 18,000 workshops making children’s clothing.
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