Singaporean film-maker Anthony Chen brings warmth, sympathy and directness to this intimate drama set in Yanji on China’s border with North Korea. Three young people – two men and a woman – make a connection; each are looking for a way of breaking free from the emotional deep-freeze they’ve landed themselves in, just as the whole world wants to thaw itself out of the vast stagnancy created by the Covid pandemic. At its best, this movie has the easy and seductively unencumbered swing of the French New Wave, with something…
Tag: Cannes film festival
Youth review – heart-stopping stories in China’s sweatshop capital
Charlie Chaplin’s frantic production-line factory worker in Modern Times is a ghostly presence in this giant, immersive documentary from Chinese director Wang Bing, the movie equivalent of a wall-sized tapestry; it is about the sweatshop capital of China, the northern town of Zhili in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, known as the “city of children’s clothing”. Thousands of workshops turn out mountains of cheap garments and every year vast numbers of young people from about 16 to 22 come from outlying cities to do a season of brutally hard work in return…