Open City Documentary Festival: Bitter Money

Over the past decade and a half, Wang Bing has established himself as China’s preeminent documentary artist. His work, often epic in both length and scale, bears witness to the rawness of life on the far edges of Chinese society.

In Bitter Money, a prize winner at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, Wang brings his raw and uncompromising aesthetic to bear on the lives of garment workers on the eastern coast of China. His unflinching camera follows a group of workers both at work through 12 hour shifts and in their off-hours, as they hang around shabby dorms drinking, fighting, laughing, dreaming of home and worrying about money.

Trapped though they are in oppressive jobs, abusive relationships and dispiriting surroundings, through patient observation Wang captures the contours of these workers' lives, slowly revealing the humanity even in these most desperate of situations.

Bitter Money, dir. Wang Bing, France/China/Hong Kong 2016, 152 mins