Bing Wang

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Shi Wei, a young migrant garment worker, flops back onto a pile of soft fabric bundles on his workshop’s floor, cellphone in hand. “Shit, I’m exhausted,” he says to the boss who’s trying to get him to sew more clothing before the Lunar New Year break. “I’m beat, I tell you.”

Work in the garment factories of Zhili, where some 300,000 migrants from rural China sew clothing, is winding down for the season. Finally, the incessant hum of sewing machines fades away. Now it’s time for the workers to try and convince their managers to pay them so they can return home for New Year celebrations.Read More »

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Youth (Hard Times) is the second chapter of Wang Bing’s monumental opus on the diminished youth of China, who work seemingly endless hours and have traded life for financial exploitation. Making low wages, they view earning money as their sole horizon.Read More »

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This documentary installation consists of a single, 15-hour take shot in a garment factory in China and captures the daily labor of its 300,000 migrant workers and the functioning of its 18,000 production units. Rigorous and hypnotic, 15 Hours marks Wang’s most radical meditation on the contemporary meaning of work and the state of labor conditions in present-day China.Read More »

It recounts the harrowing story of life at one of Mao’s camps, at the end of the fifties, where ‘rightists’ were sent to be ‘re-educated through labor’.Read More »

Synopsis:
Liming is a worker district close to Shanghai – the richest city in China. Every year, many young people leave their villages and move there. They are between 17 and 20, all from rural Yunnan province, 2,500 km west, where the Yangtze River has its source. These young Yunnaneses often live at their place of work, in dormitories, unsanitary rooms, or sometimes in small studios. Time and space to meet is missing them. So, they communicate through QQ, MSN China. They live as adults but they are teenagers.Read More »

Three sisters live alone in a small village family house in the high mountains of the Yunan region. Their parents are nowhere to be seen. The three little girls send their days working in the fields or wondering in the village. As their aunt finds difficult to provide food to the girls, the father returns to the village. He has come to take the girls with him to the city but he then agrees to leave the older one under the supervision of her grandfather.Read More »

Gao Ertai, born 1931 is an artist, teacher, activist and philosopher who was imprisoned in the 1950s in a Chinese labor camp. This documentary chronicles his lifelong pursuit of freedom.

Beauty Lives in Freedom, following a week-long tour of his works in the United States. The film chronicles the Chinese artist, philosopher, and activist Gao Ertai’s lifelong pursuit of freedom. Gao was sent to a labor camp for re-education in the 1950s while a teacher in the western province of Gansu, and later became a political detainee in Sichuan following the June Fourth Tiananmen Incident. He successfully escaped to Hong Kong with his wife Pu Xiaoyu in 1992. The 80-year-old Gao and his wife currently live in Las Vegas.Read More »

Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks is a nine hour, three part documentary about the decline of Chinese state-run heavy industry.

In 1999 Wang Bing, not long graduated from Beijing’s Film Academy, arrived at the Tie Xi industrial district of Shenyang with little more than a tiny DV camera he didn’t even own. Tie Xi (the name literally means ‘west of the tracks’) was at the time China’s oldest and largest industrial centre, built by the Japanese in World War II, nationalised come the end of the war and subsequently taken over by the newly-founded Communist party.Read More »

A civil war has been smouldering for decades in Myanmar’s Kokang region, which is home to the Ta’ang people (also known as the Palaung). When their lives are once again in danger in spring 2015, it’s mostly the women and children who flee over the border to China. Wang Bing accompanies a few of these communities thrown together by fate, at once modern and almost mythical and archaic. They wander the remote mountains with few possessions, camp in makeshift compounds and can sometimes earn a few yuan during the sugarcane harvest. Or they move on to the next place – which is never any better. Sometimes, around the evening campfire, they talk about what they’ve experienced – until someone says that it’d be better not to talk at all, it’s too painful.Read More »