Week 25/2024

Wang Bing’s penultimate documentary, Youth (Spring), is being shown at Cinema Galeries this week. Filmed over five years in Zhili, a city 150 km from Shanghai, it portrays young migrants from rural regions around the Yangtze Delta who flock to a textile manufacturing hub seeking sustenance. Bing condensed 2,600 hours of footage into a three-and-a-half-hour mosaic that captures their toil and transient relationships amid seasonal changes, bankruptcies, and family pressures. As Bing explained in an interview: “Film and traditional narratives often seem to pick an individual out of the multitude of lives around us, like one fish out of the sea, and turn this person into a hero meant to stand for the world. I didn’t want that spotlight effect. I prefer to see all these characters swimming together in the ocean of everyday life, and try to capture something in each of them to suggest the personal difficulties they’re facing and the essence of their individual story.”


Our second pick is a special screening of Chantal Akerman’s La folie Almayer (2011). Based on the novel by Joseph Conrad, the film tells the story of Western businessman Kaspar Almayer, whose dreams of a bright future for his beloved daughter Nina are crushed under the weight of his own eagerness and bias. Akerman described it as “a tragic history, like ancient tragedies that never grow old. A story as old as the world. A story as young as the world, of love and madness, of impossible dreams.” The screening will be followed by a master class in French with production manager Marianne Lambert, who will talk about her work on the film.


The final film, Wir haben lange geschwiegen by Frauenfilmgruppe München, is part of the We Have Long Been Silent programme that was featured at this year’s Courtisane Festival and now runs at CINEMATEK. Presented by programmer Kristofer Woods, this series revisits the history of New German Cinema from the perspective of its female directors, often overlooked by history. Sabzian previously published interviews with Ula Stöckl and Helga Reidemeister and will release an interview with Cristina Perincioli next week.