Review | Venice 2024: Youth (Homecoming) movie review – a riveting look at China’s migrant workers

Wang Bing spent three years compiling this documentary about migrant workers in Hebei and the moments of joy they find in their harsh lives

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A still from Youth (Homecoming), Wang Bing’s compelling documentary about migrant workers in China.

James Mottram

Published: 8:30pm, 6 Sep 2024Updated: 10:36pm, 6 Sep 2024

4.5/5 stars

A young man wheels his brightly coloured SpongeBob suitcase along the grey corridors of an imposing concrete block. A toddler stands wailing in a courtyard. A machinist, cigarette hanging from his mouth, rips through dozens of garments in minutes. Lads lark around letting off firecrackers in a field.

These are just some of the images captured in Wang Bing’s latest illuminating documentary Youth (Homecoming).

Shot between 2014 and 2019, this serves as a follow-up to his extraordinary 2023 non-fiction film Youth (Spring) and this year’s Youth (Hard Times), which set out to pull back the curtain on the textile industry in Zhili City, in northern China’s Hebei province.

A still from Youth (Homecoming), directed by Wang Bing.

As the end captions of Youth (Homecoming) remind us, Zhili City has some 18,000 privately owned workshops that employ around 300,000 migrant workers. The conditions are cramped, noisy and poor, with workers sleeping in adjacent rooms overflowing with junk.

Premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, the first half of Youth (Homecoming) sees workers preparing to return home to China’s southwestern Yunnan province for Lunar New Year in 2016.