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Youth (Spring).In a crowded living room, a girl shoos her uncle away from in front of the television set, though no one is really watching, blocking the stage for what will be a pivotal scene of her life. So much the better for Wang Bing’s camera, which gets a clear view of the family as they discuss the teenager’s prospects in tones of alternating anticipation and concern. She has lied about her age in order to obtain a work permit and will soon travel across the country, from Yunnan province in the southwest to Zhejiang in the east, and spend a season sewing children’s clothing in one of the thousands of workshops of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City. For the next two and half hours, Bitter Money (2016) will chart her journey and many others’: After days and nights on buses and trains, they arrive wide-eyed in an unfamiliar city,...

Last Train to Zhili: Bing Brings Youth Cycle to Circular Close

Wang Bing completes his ‘Youth’ trilogy with finale Youth (Homecoming), which features the most forgiving running time of the three segments at only two and a half hours. The Cannes premiered Youth (Spring) (read review) was an hour longer and Youth (Hard Times) (read review), which premiered several weeks earlier at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, clocked in at nearly four hours. The entire project was shot between 2014 to 2019, mostly in China’s Zhili province, home to a multitude of garment workshops. The final chapter appropriately begins with some 2014 footage and ends in 2019, but most of its integral moments transpire at the end of 2015 and into the 2016 Chinese New Year.…...

“Black Ox,” a powerful rural drama from Japan’s Tsuta Tetsuichiro, has been picked up for world sales by Hong Kong and Beijing-based agency Asian Shadows. The film has its world premiere on Friday in the Asian Future section of the Tokyo International Film Festival and will go on commercial release in Taiwan the following week.

Set in the 19th century, “Black Ox” follows the life of a man, transitioning from a hunter-gatherer existence in the mountains to a life in the farm. One day, he comes across an ox, which somehow, he succeeds in leading back to his home. He lives with the animal, which becomes his companion in a life of changing seasons.

The Japan-set film is inspired by the “Ten Ox-Herding Pictures” a series of short poems and illustrations from the Zen Buddhist tradition that depict the path to enlightenment and spiritual awakening.

The cast includes the Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng,...

Make the Best of Us: Bing’s ‘Youth’ Cycle Expands Into the Gloom

The middle part of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy, Youth (Hard Times) perhaps more properly addresses the bleak realities of his observational endeavor, cobbled together into a cohesive structure from footage shot between 2014 and 2019. Following the Cannes premiered 2023 film Youth (Spring) (read review), which felt a rather cynical moniker for subjects tethered to Sisyphean work routines in their prime, his second installment, which appears to be more systematically edited into a time frame from 2015, suggests a more blatant, world weary scope. At a running time of nearly four hours, its immersive, repetitive structure, while inherently Bing’s signature, feels more punishing if only because there’s no real room for levity in its lengthy, often grueling discourse of late teens and twenty-somethings struggling to make ends meet in thankless textile shops.…...

Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia,” Carlos Marqués-Marcet “They Will be Dust” and Yeo Siew Hua’s “Stranger Eyes” all won big at Spain’s auteurist haven Valladolid Film Festival on Saturday, in a second edition under José Luis Cienfuegos whose prizes served as a vindication of the changes he has wrought at the festival as well as an indication of some ways European arthouse is going.

All three directors’ awards build on prior upbeat reception. Playing Cannes Premiere, “Misericordia,” which scooped Valladolid’s best picture Golden Spike and its screenplay trophy, was hailed by Variety as a “darkly comic backwoods fable of pansexual desire and small-town sociopathy” which marks a “welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific ‘Stranger by the Lake.'”

The Valladolid jury, made up of Greek director Sofia Exarchou, Spanish actress Aida Folch, critic and editor Devika Girish, German producer Ingmar Trost and Spanish director and writer Luis López Carrasco,...

The 2024 edition of the Valladolid International Film Week, also known as Seminci, wrapped on Saturday (October 26), giving its top award, the Golden Spike, to Misericordia by Alain Guiraudie.

Misericordia tells the story of a man who returns to his hometown for the funeral of his former boss, the village baker, and decides to stay for a few days with the man’s widow, getting involved in a series of unexpected events.

Guiraudie also won the best screenplay award.

The members of the Valladolid jury, Greek director Sofía Exarchou; Spanish actress Aida Folch; American critic Devika Girish; Spanish filmmaker Luis López Carrasco...

While there’s a few more fall film festivals popping up in the next month, the major ones are behind us, which means we have a strong sense of the films to have on your radar in the coming months and even through 2025. We’ve asked our writers from across the globe to weigh in on their favorite world premieres from Locarno Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and BFI London Film Festival.

Our coverage will continue with a few more reviews this week, and far beyond as we provide updates on the journey of these selections, so continue to explore all of our festival coverage here. In the meantime, check out top picks from our writers below and return soon for our extensive year-end coverage.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre)

1. April (Dea Kulumbegashvili)

2 and 3. Youth (Homecoming and Hard Times) (Wang Bing...

With titles like Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire and Mati Diop’s Dahomey, London Film Festival head Kristy Matheson, in her second year at the helm, inches further toward what appears to be an interesting strategic shift at the Lff: a full-scale embrace of the avant-garde.

Alongside Hunt-Ehrlich and Diop, experimental and deeply contemporary filmmakers such as Wang Bing, Payal Kapadia and Tsai Ming-liang feature throughout this year’s Lff lineup. The experimental mix-up, Matheson told us ahead of Wednesday night’s opening, is thanks to the enthusiasm of London’s “very cinema-literate audience.”

“There are so many amazing cinemas all across the city screening great work all year round. And that’s our core audience,” she said.

Opening the festival on Wednesday is Blitz, the latest feature-length project from Turner Prize- and Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen. Other headline titles set for the festival include Luca Guadagnino’s Queer,...

Wang Bing’s Youth (Hard Times) picks up where its predecessor left off, deepening our understanding of lives dictated by backbreaking labor. Filmed over five years in garment factories throughout Zhili, China, this installment carries forward the documentary trilogy’s immersion in the rhythms of industrial toil. Through subtle shifts in focus, Hard Times subtly underscores both the passage of time and growing frustrations among its subjects – young migrant workers fighting for dignity amid dismal circumstances.

As with Spring, the film transports viewers into its world through lengthy, observant shots soaked in the din of sewing machines. This allows us to truly feel the numbing routine engulfing these factory workers, who labor as fast as minds and bodies allow. Yet Hard Times departs from its predecessor in documenting bolder organizing efforts against miserly bosses. It follows mounting disputes over paltry piecework pay and debates splitting the crowd.

While maintaining a fly-on-the-wall approach,...

The long-running New York Film Festival, now in its 62nd year – one of the longer film festivals, with a span of more than two weeks — is showcasing some of the longest documentaries on record.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, directed by Julia Loktev, measures almost 5.5 hours long. Taken together, Wang Bing’s Youth (Homecoming) and Youth (Hard Times), both playing at NYFF, run over 6 hours. That’s brief compared to exergue, the documentary directed by Dimitris Athyridis that clocks in at 14 hours.

Exergue, which premiered at the Berlinale in February before playing at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, explores the 14th iteration of Documenta, the quinquennial event that is considered the most important contemporary art exhibition in the world.

“There’s something about the way that film really digs into this extremely fascinating process of making an art exhibition,” says Dennis Lim, artistic...

John Hsu’s Taiwanese supernatural comedy Dead Talents Society has scored 11 nominations for the 61st Golden Horse Awards, followed by Tom Lin’s Yen And Ai-Lee and Geng Jun’s Bel Ami, with eight nods each.

Dead Talents Society and Bel Ami are among the five films competing in the best film category, along with Ray Yeung’s All Shall Be Well, Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes and Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film. The same five films are also running in the best director category.

They reflect the overall representation at this year’s Golden Horse Awards, with the participation of Hong Kong,...

Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy of documentaries about Chinese garment workers could have just as easily been named Three Colors. Like the titles that comprise Krzysztof Kieślowski’s triptych, each of Wang’s films is informed by a different color, though it’s primarily used to tint the title cards and chyrons that indicate a given sequence’s setting and subjects. The first installment, last year’s Youth (Spring), appropriately uses a lush green, while the subsequent Youth (Hard Times) went with a punishing deep red. The concluding entry, Youth (Homecoming), opts for something that works in more ambiguous ways, using a light blue that, depending on the viewer, could signal calm, harmony, or even sadness.

Youth (Homecoming) operates as something of an expansion of the concluding sequences of its two forebears. Youth (Spring) and Youth (Hard Times), which both run a full hour longer than the fleet (by Wang...

Gone are the days when cinephiles could just expect “Cannes on the Hudson” from the New York Film Festival. In his fifth year since assuming leadership of the selection committee from Kent Jones, artistic director Dennis Lim continues to bring both vitality and variety to the festival. If there’s a near-constant among the changes, it’s Hong Sang-soo having two movies in the main slate. (This year it’s By the Stream and A Traveler’s Needs.)

Elder statesmen like David Cronenberg, Mike Leigh, and Paul Schrader return with their latest films. But this 62nd edition of the festival, which runs from September 27 to October 24, doesn’t belong to the veterans. If any streak runs through the main slate, it’s the prominence of second features, including RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (this year’s opening-night selection), Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light.

by Cláudio Alves

Youth (Hard Times) won a special mention at Locarno, the Junior Jury and Fipresci prizes.

Last year, Wang Bing presented Youth (Spring) at TIFF after the film's world premiere in competition at Cannes. It was to be the first part of an epic trilogy, one of a magnitude that's impressive even for such a grand muralist as the director is known to be. His filmography is full of works documenting the Chinese dispossessed, often curious about the labor forces whose strenuous efforts make the national economy work its exploitative, feverishly expansionist dream. For Youth, he focused his camera on the greener workers, a new generation consigned to a life of unfair garment labor, struggling to survive within the putative economic boom of modern China. Wang shot it between 2014 and 2019, dividing his findings between three films that collectively amount to a nearly ten-hour-runtime.

At The Film Experience, we've already gone over Spring,...

Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.A camel, it has been said, is a horse designed by committee. This seems wrong, though, since it assumes that a horse was the initial objective, and that the camel resulted from too many incompatible interests and desires. In fact, the camel is perfectly equipped for what it needs to do, and if that camel finds itself having to step into a horse’s position, that speaks more to poor planning and shortsighted decision-making than to the nature of the camel itself. Nevertheless, the point of this aphorism is to suggest that you get something weird and nonfunctional when you allow too many people to have their say. But are these outcomes really that strange? What you get is more likely to be the sort of compromise that pleases no one. The Affordable Care Act is national health care by committee. Oprah’s Book Club is literature by committee.

Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.The cinema is a house. Part of the beauty and potential of this house is that it is at once material and metaphorical. The projection of a film onto a screen always denotes a living space around it, whether physical walls and roof or a more nebulous zone, as outdoors under a night sky. This space is inclusive of some things and exclusive of others; its center looks different than its perimeter. The movie itself can also create a house, building within and between shots an architecture of imagination abiding by unspoken rules and formed by plans known only to its makers, whose contours, coherence, and meaning are discovered through exploration by guests. What kind of house a film forms, on what ground it was built, what keeps it together, and what it’s like to move through it are questions whose pursuit animates some of cinema’s great pleasures.

After “Youth: Spring” and “Youth: Hard Times”, celebrated Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing is back with the third and last part of his trilogy documentary focusing on the lives, labors and challenges of young hardworking textile workers in the city of Huzhou.

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These baby-faced twenty-somethings (some are still in their late teens) come from all over China, leaving their hometowns and travelling sometimes thousands of kilometers to the city to work in one of its 18,000 workshops – Huzhou, in the province of Zheijang, is a major textile hub. From 2014 to 2019, Wang and his team followed these young migrant workers, filming them in the teeming sweatshops, some of which line up so-called Happiness Road. There they work for 10 to 12 hours in poor working conditions, while spending their leisure time in cramped dormitories, playing cards, flirting, chain smoking, bantering, arguing, making up, or anything...

Notebook is covering the Locarno Film Festival with a series of correspondence pieces written by the participants in the Critics Academy.Illustrations by Lucy Jones.What happens to the body at a film festival? Over the course of the Locarno Film Festival, we tried—as much as decency allows—to investigate this very broad question. These responses seek to tie together the films we’ve seen with our embodied experiences of Locarno, both inside and outside of the cinema, grappling with the limits of our attention, our exhaustion, and our desires. Bitter Victory.Pierre Jendrysiak:Far from the expected glamor, attending a film festival can sometimes feel like the trek through the desert pictured in Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957): a dreamy haze, almost a struggle. Under the heat of the Locarno sun, one wanders the streets, looking for a nice bartender to refill their water bottle, a little bit...

Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring), the first in the filmmaker’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers in Zhejiang province in eastern China, eschewed incident to stress the numbing quality of the manual labor and economic stagnation of its young migrant workers. The second installment in the trilogy, Youth (Hard Times), similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope.

Wang again keys us to the perspective of the workers, subjecting us to the constant roar of sewing machines until the din of routine is understood as that and becomes barely noticeable. The oscillation between scenes of toil and moments of rest in which laborers are too tired to do much of anything other than scroll on their phones conveys just how easy it is to become numb in such an environment. Indeed, at first it seems that the biggest change from the first film is...

Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, best known for Soundtrack To A Coup d’Etat, will be the guest of honour at the 2024 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

Several of Grimonprez’s films are to screen at the festival including Double Take, Shadow World and Blue Orchids. The filmmaker will also participate in a in conversation and unveil his top 10 contemporary films.

Grimonprez first gained international acclaim with his 1997 feature dial H-I-s-t-o-r-y. His latest film, Soundtrack To A Coup d’Etat, has screened at several festivals including Sundance, where it won the jury prize in cinematic innovation; and Thessaloniki, picking up the audience award.

August documentarian Wang Bing (West of the Tracks) concludes his Youth trilogy about garment workers with Youth (Homecoming), a work much like its predecessors in that it’s simultaneously deeply fascinating and profoundly soporific. This last chapter spends less time in the Eastern industrial zone of Zhili, Zhejiang Province, China, where the many of the subjects Wang has been following since Youth (Spring) spend long hours and most of their year plying their trade.

Instead, as the title might suggest, Homecoming, which premiered in competition at Venice, follows several workers on their journeys home for the New Year, to places as far-flung as Yunnan, on the other side of the country, or Anhui, a province next door to Zhejiang. Viewers who have been keeping up with the series from the beginning may feel rewarded by the staggering mountain landscapes and other open spaces here, a respite after all those hours watching garment assembly in gnarly,...

With six Luxembourgish projects on display, this year’s Venice Film Festival served as a victory lap for a modest state with an outsized impact. Boasting 1,200 professionals, a vibrant animation sector, and an output of 25-30 titles per year, the Grand Duchy’s co-production driven ecosystem is all the more remarkable for its relative youth and for the speed of its ascent.

“Thirty-five years ago we had no professional infrastructure and no real audiovisual production,” says Luxembourg Film Fund chief Guy Daleiden. “We had to build everything from the ground up, developing an autonomous sector with production companies and technicians that are now highly regarded across the globe.”

In the subsequent decades, local daughter Vicky Krieps has given the country its biggest star and “Mr. Hublot” directors Laurent Witz and Alexandre Espigares brought homegrown projects to the Oscar podium, together tracking a wider blueprint to develop the live action and animation sectors in tandem.

The 68th BFI London Film Festival has just announced the line-up and – as always – a wide variety of Asian films is included in the vast Programme. Over 12 days, the Lff will showcase 255 works from 80 countries, featuring 64 languages and including 112 projects made by female and non-binary filmmakers.

The London Film Festival, officially called the BFI London Film Festival is organised annually by the British Film Institute (BFI) since 1953. It is the UK’s largest public Festival of its kind and is visited by thousands of film enthusiasts who have the the ability to see films, documentaries and shorts from all over the world. The festival will take place at London’s BFI Southbank and The Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, as well as cinemas and venues across central London, and will run from 9 to 20 October 2024.

All the info about tickets and booking are Here.

And now, let’s browse the...

Closing out a triptych that previously ran through “Youth (Spring)” and “Youth (Hard Times),” Wang Bing’s final panel in his granular account of Middle Kingdom sweatshops wraps the trilogy in paradox. Running a scant 2.5 hours, “Youth (Homecoming)” is not only the shortest entry of his 10 hour saga; it’s also the most abundant, ending the series on a high note while calling into question the degree of emphasis of the earlier two iterations. Still, this is good news for the casual cinephile or Sinophile curious about this expansive undertaking, but less able (or willing) to buckle down for the half-day commitment. While “Youth (Homecoming)” certainly benefits from the seven hours of weaving-machine whir that preceded, the film quite ably stands alone.

That’s entirely by design. Whereas the previous two volleys embedded within the visually monotonous tombs to youthful ambition that make up the garment district of Zhili City,...

Fiercely independent Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing spent five years filming young workers in Zhili, an industrial region near Shanghai where around 18,000 garment workshops churn out cheap clothes for the domestic market. The workshops run on cheap labor from the provinces; around 200,000 make the long trek from their home villages for six-month periods, living in the workshop dormitories and working 15-hour days. They are only paid at the end of each six-month bout and have no idea how much they will get; the wages are calculated on piece-work rates so depend on how many units they turn out of their sewing machines, but also on sales, cash flow and their bosses’ whims. Often enough, it seems, they get next to nothing.

Director Wang followed a small group of workers, widening his scope to include friends and siblings who joined them in Zhili over the years, filming them at work and in...

The BFI London Film Festival (Lff) 2024 will screen documentaries about “witches,” and zoos and animal rescue centers in Argentina, first features from directors of varied backgrounds, and Ali Abbas’ Donald Trump film The Apprentice in its gala lineup organizers said on Wednesday as they unveiled the full program for this year’s event.

Overall, Lff will screen 253 titles, including features films, shorts, series, and immersive works, that hail from 79 countries and feature 64 languages. Of the total, 112 works are made by female and non-binary filmmakers, or 44 percent of the program, the fest said.

The London doc lineup includes the likes of Elizabeth Sankey’s 90-minute goth-y Witches, which posits a connection between historical witchery and post-partum psychological suffering and debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Meanwhile, the first feature program at Lff includes Denise Fernandes’ Hanami, which recently world-premiered at the Locarno Film Festival, and Neo Sora’s Happyend, which debuted...

Mubi is exactly the service for people who see Mysteries of Lisbon is streaming and ask “yes but what version?” Accordingly I’m excited that September brings the extended, miniseries cut of Raúl Ruiz’s late-career triumph, which arrives alongside the notable new release that is Zia Anger’s My First Film––here programmed in a “Millennial Meltdown” series alongside Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun and Martine Syms’s The African Desperate. Take special note of Marie-Claude Trielhou’s Simone Barbés, or Virtue, which has captured cinephile attention since its restoration, probably because it’s a great film that encapsulates so much of what you’d even want in a movie.

Meanwhile, Tarsem’s 4K restoration (and slightly adjusted cut) of 2006’s The Fall makes its streaming premiere; there’s opportunity to catch up with Coralie Fargeat ahead of The Substance; recent releases Riddle of Fire and Geoff...

Emmanuel Mouret’s Venice Competition title Three Friends, starring Camille Cottin, has sold widely in key territories for Pyramide International.

The film has sold to Lucky Red in Italy, La Aventura in Spain, Madman in Australia, K-Films in Quebec, New Cinema in Israel, Cirko in Hungary, Future Film in Finland, Spentzos in Greece, Dcm in Switzerland, Vertigo/Liberty in Benelux, Selmer in Norway, Panda in Austria, Njuta in Sweden, M2 in Poland, Beta Film in Bulgaria and Fivia in the former Yugoslavia.

Cottin, India Hair and Sara Forestier lead the cast as three friends with different views on love whose...

Saulė Bliuvaitė with her Golden Leopard for Toxic Photo: Locarno Film Festival / Ti-Press Saulė Bliuvaitė's debut feature Toxic Toxic (Akiplėša) has won the Golden Leopard top prize at the Locarno Film Festival.

Her drama is a gritty coming-of-ager, with experimental touches, set in a bleak industrial town in Lithuania. It also took home the First Feature award. The Special Jury Prize went to Moon, directed by Kurdwin Ayub, about a kickboxer who takes on a job as a personal trainer in the Middle East.

It has been a good week for Lithuania, with Laurynas Bareiša’s Drowning Dry also picking up multiple prizes. A puzzle box of a film, set around a family tragedy, it won the Best Director Leopard plus two of the gender-neutral acting awards for Gelminė Glemžaitė, Agnė Kaktaitė, Giedrius Kiela and Paulius Markevičius.

The other acting prize went to Kim Minhee for Hong Sangsoo’s By The Stream.

Lithuanian cinema, not typically that well represented on the international film festival circuit, was the big story of this year’s Locarno Film Festival awards ceremony, with two films from the Baltic nation taking a number of top prizes between them.

“Toxic,” an auspicious debut from writer-director Saulė Bliuvaitė, won not only the Golden Leopard for Best Film in the fest’s premier International Competition — from a jury chaired by Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner — but also, in an unusual double, the top prize in the separately juried First Feature Competition. Bliuvaitė’s compatriot Laurynas Bareiša, meanwhile, won Best Director in the International Competition for his sophomore feature “Drowning Dry,” while the same film’s ensemble also collectively took one of the jury’s gender-neutral acting prizes.

A hard-hitting study of alliances and rivalries between teenage girls enrolled at a modeling school in small-town Lithuania, “Toxic” stood out in the Competition...

Akiplėša (Toxic), the feature debut from Lithuanian writer and director Saulė Bliuvaitė that explores the human body and mysterious model agencies, is the winner of the Locarno Film Festival’s 2024 international competition, which was honored with the Pardo d’Oro, or Golden Leopard, in the Swiss town on Saturday. Locarno77 organizers called the movie “an incisive portrayal of teenage girls and the crushing expectations imposed upon them.”

Meanwhile, the special jury prize went to Iraq-born Austrian auteur Kurdwin Ayub for her sophomore fiction feature Mond (Moon). The film follows former martial artist Sarah who leaves Austria to train three sisters from a wealthy Jordanian family. “It’s all about sisters, no matter where they come from, and about cages, no matter where they are,” according to Ayub.

Lithuania, which has a population of about three million people but was represented by two features in this year’s Locarno international competition,...

The latest documentary from Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing is titled Youth (Hard Times). For anyone who watched its predecessor, Youth (Spring), in the early days of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, or anywhere else, this news may be cause for concern. Filmed in typically anthropological detail by the master director and his team between the years 2014 and 2019, Spring documented the lives and labors of a group of textile workers in a bustling corner of Zhili––a world of endless hours, meager pay, ruthless bosses, and worrying conditions. It looked like the kind of place where not much light gets in, regardless of the suffocating air pollution. If these were not “hard times,” you had to wonder, what are?

Picking up where Spring left off, Youth (Hard Times) is the dense middle act of what will eventually be a trilogy––a third section, titled Homecoming, is set to play in Venice––that,...

Just when it seems like Wang Bing’s textile documentaries might run out of observations, the Chinese filmmaker’s “Youth (Hard Times)” — the second in his planned trilogy — presents the passage of time in unforeseen ways. His narrative, about young workers’ growing frustrations in Zhili (a district of Huzhou City), is built obliquely but precisely, covering a variety of human subjects whose lives don’t often overlap, but who are bound by common circumstances. At nearly four hours in length, it surpasses even its gargantuan predecessor “Youth (Spring),” but it also uses that film as a platform for deeper exploration.

Garment labor in the wake of China’s textile boom has long been a fixation for Wang, whose 2016 doc “Bitter Money” follows migrant worker struggles, and whose subsequent museum installation “15 Hours” unfolds in a clothing factory over a single, 900-minute take. “Youth (Spring),” which kicked off his new trilogy at Cannes last year,...

The middle part of a trilogy consisting of 2023’s “Youth (Spring)” and the imminent “Youth (Homecoming),” “Youth (Hard Times)” crystallizes the strengths of Wang Bing’s latest epic-length documentary project. “Hard Times” offers no radical change from the (quite deliberately) repetitive construction of “Spring,” but does feature subtle shifts in focus and certainly a lot more in the way of incident and splintering effects. That’s not to say that there’s now a lack of sequences devoted to people humming along to music playing on their phones while they work — the year’s most surprising needle drop may be that an austere arthouse documentary features an electronic track that seemingly samples The Offspring’s “Original Prankster.”

A primer, first, for anyone who’s not already familiar with the project. Slowness and making viewers aware of deceptively aimless pacing are perhaps the definitive characteristics of Wang’s output. He embeds...

Icarus Films and the dGenerate Films collection have snapped up North American rights to Wang Bing’s Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming) before their world premieres in Locarno and Venice, respectively.

The documentaries will then get their North American premieres in Toronto next month, followed by their US premieres in New York Film Festival’s Main Slate.

Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming) conclude the trilogy that started with Cannes 2023 selection Youth (Spring) and explore the lives of migrant workers at a garment factory in China.

Icarus Films president Jonathan Miller said, “We’re excited and honored to again...

We have two exciting updates from TIFF: first, the Wavelengths line-up has been unveiled; second, NYFF has confirmed that Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer will have its U.S. premiere there, meaning it will be heading to Toronto after its showcase in Venice. The Wavelengths programme essentially curates from items that shored up from Berlinale to Cannes to Locarno and Venice — so we have Berlinale comp preemed Pepe by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias (read our ★★★★ star review), we have Miguel Gomes‘ Best Director winning Grand Tour (read our review) and Wang Bing‘s second and third parts of his trilogy which will be unveiled at Locarno and Venice in the next couple of weeks.…...

International auteurs Miguel Gomes, Wang Bing and Roberto Minervini will be part of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program, TIFF organizers announced on Thursday.

The festival will present the North American premieres of “Grand Tour,” a period piece for which Gomes won the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival; Minervini’s “The Damned,” a Civil War-era drama that screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section; and two films by Chinese documentarian Wang Bing, “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming).”

The Wavelengths section, which is devoted to daring cinema and contemporary art, will also include “exergue – on documenta 14,” a 14-hour documentary by Greek director Dimitris Athiridis that will be presented over three separate screenings.

Wavelengths is divided into different sections – one consisting of 11 feature films, another with a special presentation of Egyptian director Wael Shawky’s “Drama 1882” and another showcasing 13 different short and medium-length films grouped into thematic programs.

Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has announced its Wavelengths programme highlighting visionary work including Dimitris Athiridis’s 14-hour documentary exergue - on documenta 14, and a Classics line-up featuring work from Atom Egoyan and Frederick Wiseman.

The Wavelengths programme comprises 11 features, three shorts programmes, and an in-cinema looped presentation of Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s Drama 1882.

The features selections includes Cannes entries Viêt And Nam by Trương Minh Quý, Grand Tour by Miguel Gomes and The Damned by Roberto Minervini, and Berlin selection Pepe by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias.

exergue - on documenta 14 receives its North American premiere after...

The Toronto Film Festival has unveiled its Wavelengths program for artist-driven experimental work that includes films by avant garde directors Wang Bing, Roberto Minervini and Miguel Gomes.

With 11 features on offer, the Wavelengths section includes a 14-hour documentary, exergue – on documenta 14, from director Dimitris Athiridi set to be presented over three screenings.

The section will also feature North American premieres for the remaining chapters of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy: Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming); Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour, which won best director at Cannes; The Damned by Roberto Minervini, an American Civil War drama that won best director in the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes; and Pepe, by director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, about the life and death reflections of a hippo with connections to Pablo Escobar.

Wavelengths last year in Toronto screened Wang’s Youth (Spring), the Cannes competition title about Chinese garment workers.

The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival continues to update its robust programming lineup. This year’s Wavelengths and Classics programs boast various hits, now including the North-American premiere of buzzy Cannes title “Viêt and Nam,” directed by Trương Minh Quý.

The Wavelengths lineup tallies 11 features, three shorts programs, and a special in-cinema looped presentation. Wavelengths alums Miguel Gomes (“Grand Tour”), Roberto Minervini (“The Damned”), and Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias (“Pepe”) return with their respective North-American premieres. Jessica Sarah Rinland is also back to the program with “Collective Monologue.”

There is also the 14-hour documentary “exergue – on documenta 14” from Greek filmmaker Dimitris Athiridi, which will be presented over the course of three screenings.

The program is curated by Senior Curator Andréa Picard and Associate Curator Jesse Cumming, with contributions by Giovanna Fulvi, Nataleah Hunter-Young, and June Kim.

For the shorts selections, the late auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s final film “Scénarios...

The 49th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival presented by Rogers has set their Wavelengths and Classics section. Wavelengths includes 11 movies, and 3 short programs and a special in-cinema looped presentation with diverse works from established auteurs and emerging talent.

Of note this year are the North American premieres of Roberto Minervini’s Civil War epic The Damned, Miguel Gomes’ Black and White period movie Grand Tour, and the completion of Wang Bing’s docu trilogy, Youth (Hard Times) and Youth (Homecoming) about Chinese sweatshop workers, the filmmaker’s chronicling which began in Youth (Spring) which played at Cannes and TIFF in 2023.

Jessica Sarah Rinland returns to the sidebar with Collective Monologue, alongside the North American Premiere of the queer Viêt and Nam, by first-time Wavelengths filmmaker Trương Minh Quý. The 14-hour, compulsively watchable exergue – on documenta 14 from Greek filmmaker Dimitris Athiridi will be presented in three screenings.

Short film...

Founded in 1946, Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival is one of the world’s longest-running film festivals, known for its adventurous programming, exciting retrospectives, and nightly open-air screenings in the Piazza Grande, capable of seating 8,000 spectators. The latter is by no means the only screening spot, but it’s the location most associated with the festival.

Hosting world premieres and special screenings of highlights from Cannes, SXSW, and other early-year festivals, this year’s Piazza Grande selection includes the launch of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette portrait “The Flood,” starring Guillaume Canet and Mélanie Laurent; Bérénice Béjo-led thriller “Mexico 86”; Mohammad Rasoulof’s Cannes prizewinner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”; actor Paz Vega’s directorial debut “Rita”; and the world premiere of Tarsem Singh’s restored recut of “The Fall.”

The Piazza Grande often showcases more mainstream fare, but Locarno has always prided itself on providing a less hostile...

We got a nice sampling of Berlinale (e.g. the Golden Bear winner Dahomey) and Cannes (e.g. the Palme d’Or winner Anora) items with a Golden Lion Venice quintet in Dea Kulumbegashvili‘s April, Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist, Athina Rachel Tsangari‘s Harvest, Yeo Siew Hua‘s Stranger Eyes and Wang Bing‘s Youth (Hard Times) shoring up in the Main Slate section at the upcoming 62nd edition of the New York Film Festival. Both Hong Sangsoo and Wang Bing will be serving not one, but two films this year.

For those who are paying attention we have two world premieres that were completely off our radar in Julia Loktev‘s My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow and Robinson Devor‘s Suburban Fury – a docu project he has been working on for more than a decade.…...

The best-curated film festival of the year has unveiled its first complete section. The 62nd New York Film Festival has dropped its Main Slate lineup, featuring surprise world premieres from Julia Loktev and Robinson Devor, along with the latest from Pedro Almodóvar, Sean Baker, Brady Corbet, David Cronenberg, Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias, Mati Diop, Miguel Gomes, Alain Guiraudie, Hong Sangsoo, Jia Zhangke, Payal Kapadia, Dea Kulumbegashvili, Mike Leigh, Philippe Lesage, Julia Loktev, Carson Lund, Pia Marais, Steve McQueen, Roberto Minervini, Rungano Nyoni, Mohammad Rasoulof, RaMell Ross, Paul Schrader, Neo Sora, Trương Minh Quý, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Wang Bing, Yeo Siew Hua, and Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival. “The most notable...

The 2024 New York Film Festival has revealed its main slate lineup including Cannes winners Anora and Seed of the Sacred Fig as well as the U.S. premieres of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds and Roberto Minervini’s The Damned, which was also awarded at Cannes.

Indeed, the NYFF main slate features a number of Cannes prize winners in addition to Sean Baker’s Anora, which won Cannes’ Palme d’Or; exiled Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s Seed of the Sacred Fig, which was awarded a special prize; and The Damned, which won best director in the Un Certain Regard section, shared with Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which will also screen at NYFF. Other Cannes faves set to play in New York include Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which won the grand prize at the French festival, and Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour,...

New York Film Festival (NYFF) has announced a varied Main Slate featuring anticipated Venice world premiere The Brutalist from Brady Corbet as well as a raft of Cannes and Berlin winners including Sean Baker’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anora.

The line-up of 33 films announced on Tuesday morning includes Payal Kapadia’s Cannes grand prize winner All We Imagine As Light, Miguel Gomes’s best director winner Grand Tour, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, recipient of the special prize.

Mati Diop’s Berlin Golden Bear winner Dahomey takes its place in the selection, as...

Thirty-three films will make up the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival, including the latest from David Cronenberg, Sean Baker, Payal Kapadia, Mike Leigh, Mati Diop, Hong Sang-soo and Julia Loktev. The festival will take place Sept. 27 — Oct. 14, 2024.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a statement. “The most notable thing about the films in the Main Slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks— is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality. They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in, and reimagine the world.”

The movies in this year’s Main Slate come from 24 different countries.

New York Film Festival has revealed the Main Slate titles for its 62nd edition, which runs September 27 through October 14. The selection includes feature films from 24 countries, with 18 directors making their NYFF Main Slate debut, and two world, five North American, and 16 U.S. premieres. As previously announced, the festival will open with RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” and close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” and will feature Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” as its Centerpiece.

The Main Slate includes celebrated films from festivals worldwide including Cannes prize winners: Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” (Grand Prize), Sean Baker’s “Anora” (Palme d’Or), Roberto Minervini’s “The Damned”, Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour” (Best Director), Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”, and Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (Special Prize). At this year’s Berlinale, Mati Diop’s “Dahomey” received the Golden...

For film buffs on the East Coast, the New York Film Festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center are some of the best weeks of the year. Hosting both favorites from this year’s Cannes and Venice Film Festivals, as well as some premieres of its own, NYFF is the...

Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival returns this week with what is perhaps the strongest lineup festival director Giona A. Nazzaro has conjured up during his short but impactful four-year tenure. Across the festival’s official competitions, you can find new works by arthouse leaders like Hong Sang-soo, Wang Bing, Radu Jude, and Ben Rivers — all world premieres. Hollywood will also be present on the Piazza Grande with an expansive retrospective titled The Lady with the Torch set to be mounted at the fest to celebrate the centennial of Columbia Pictures.

Neapolitan filmmaker Gianluca Jodice’s latest feature The Flood, a historical drama about the last days of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s reign opens the festival on August 7. The film stars Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet, who will be handed one of the festival’s career achievement awards. The festival will also honor Jane Campion, Shah Rukh Khan, Alfonso Cuarón,...