Youth (Homecoming)

At two-and-a-half hours, this closing part of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy is also the shortest. In the first part, Wang plunged into the frenzied activity at small, privately owned clothing workshops in the Chinese city of Zhili. For the second, he zoomed out to explore the economic system operating in the textile district. In this, the closing part, Wang pulls back even further.

Homecoming sees Wang accompany several seasonal laborers on their annual journeys home to their families in the countryside, sometimes 2,000 kilometers inland. After the exuberance of Spring and the tough but energized economic struggles of Hard Times, these events lend Homecoming a more melancholy atmosphere.

There is initial relief at swapping the organized chaos of noisy clothing workshops for sweeping landscapes and sleepy villages, but the peace and quiet doesn’t last long. Family members are soon grumbling that the returning workers have brought back less money than they hoped, and complaining about local authorities. And as festive as the New Year celebrations and a marriage ceremony may have been, one question lingers when the overworked and underpaid workers return to Zhili: Where is home?