4.5/5 stars
A young man wheels his brightly coloured SpongeBob suitcase along the grey corridors of an imposing concrete block. A toddler stands wailing in a courtyard. A machinist, cigarette hanging from his mouth, rips through dozens of garments in minutes. Lads lark around letting off firecrackers in a field.
As the end captions of Youth (Homecoming) remind us, Zhili City has some 18,000 privately owned workshops that employ around 300,000 migrant workers. The conditions are cramped, noisy and poor, with workers sleeping in adjacent rooms overflowing with junk.
Premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, the first half of Youth (Homecoming) sees workers preparing to return home to China’s southwestern Yunnan province for Lunar New Year in 2016.