WANG BING: MIGRATORY PATTERNS

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Since making his debut with 2002’s astonishing West of the Tracks, Wang Bing has been cinema’s most invaluable, conscientious witness of China’s 21st-century emergence as an industrial powerhouse—and the repercussions of the country’s “economic miracle” in the lives of its citizens. Following the rapturous Cannes reception of Wang’s Youth (Spring), concerning young textile workers in the city of Zhili, we’re revisiting two of Wang’s films that likewise offer an intimate perspective on the manner in which the epidemic of mass migration in search of factory work is felt in the daily lives of Chinese people: in Three Sisters, a trio of siblings whose father has left them in their Yunnan Province village to find work in the garment industry, in Bitter Money, migrant workers laboring in the clothing mills of Huzhou. “A director intent on swallowing reality whole… No one has dared to make movies quite like this.”—Film Comment