Focusing on the factory laborers’ economic struggles and workplace conflicts, the second installment of Youth follows multiple narrative threads that stretch and tighten, sometimes to a breaking point of violence and despair. A young woman keeps making mistakes and must redo several batches of trousers, while her colleagues discuss ways to dodge the manager’s surveillance. Just released from police detention after an altercation with his boss, a young man searches in vain for his lost account book. Parents pore over sewing machines while their child plays with scissors and cell phones. From the balcony outside their shop, a group of workers watch their indebted boss beat up a fabric supplier and run away without paying their wages, so they sell the shop’s sewing machines while the landlord cuts the power and water of their living quarters. In another dark dorm, a worker who made tons of unsold denim recounts his participation in a labor riot and the ensuing police brutality. The exhaustion of overtime and deadlines thus alternates with the anxiety of dead time and wasted time, accruing into the bitterness at the core of Wang Bing’s trilogy.

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