Happiness Road

Courtesy of Gladys Glover, House on Fire, CS Productions and Cannes Film Festival.

Variety has a review of a Chinese movie about garment workers. I thought these two paragraphs give a good description of the place:

It is somehow emblematic of modern China — at least of its seamier side, as frequently explored in director Wang Bing’s unsparing documentaries — that the street on which his long, oppressive new film “Youth (Spring)” takes place should be called “Happiness Road.” A collection of clothing manufacturing workshops, arranged like a mall around a rubble-strewn central thoroughfare 150 miles and a world away from Shanghai, this semi-derelict location is so poorly described by its name that one could suspect its planners of having a little joke. Except that here in Zhili City, irony — like leisure time, fresh air and natural light — is a luxury few can afford, least of all the teens and twentysomethings spending 15-hour workdays on site before retiring to equally rundown flophouse dormitories. 

Scored only to the ceaseless rattle of sewing machines and the pop songs blasted through the studios at top volume, “Youth (Spring)” (the first instalment of a planned wider project to be culled from around 2,600 hours of footage) follows a dozen or so of the young people, mostly migrants from neighboring Anhui province, employed in these mini-factories. Their circumstances are harsh, their surroundings dystopian. The Happiness Road lot could easily be repurposed as the backdrop for a blockbuster sci-fi set in the aftermath of an extinction-level event. And yet much of the film is noisy with chatter, flirtations, in-jokes: a cheerfulness tempered by the suspicion that, like the pounding music, such banter exists largely as a distraction from the numbing daily grind.