A restless energy drives Bitter Money’s portrayal of the difficult lives of migrant garment workers who travel from rural Yunnan to the eastern city of Huzhou in search of scarce jobs and security. Like its uprooted subjects, Bitter Money seems to be ceaselessly searching for a center, a point of stability in a world set adrift by sleepless sweatshops and the crowds of slave laborers who fuel the world’s insatiable appetite for cheap and disposable goods. Bitter Money is arguably Wang’s most abstract film, the work that moves toward yet ultimately denies a socioeconomic vantage point able to survey a larger terrain. Instead Wang is drawn, again and again, to the individual lives unraveling slowly before his camera, trapped in a desperate cycle of endless work and impossible debt, an existential condition rarely rendered with such sadness and truth than in Wang’s uncompromised cinema.