In the second part of his masterclass held in November 2025 at Cinema Massimo, Turin, Wang Bing shifts his focus from the industrial landscape to the weight of time and the complexities of modern Chinese culture. Having spent years filming those on the margins of society — from labor camp survivors to mental health inmates — he discusses how memory serves as his primary editing tool and why modern consumerism has become a new form of political control.
Time in He Fengming.
Moving to the next main topic of Wang Bing’s cinema: time. A very different cinematic approach from the previous ones is utilised in He Fengming.
The director shares an anecdote: the inspiration came from a French film he watched at the Rotterdam Film Festival. He was alone; all the other viewers had left the room. It was a film in French without subtitles. “I didn’t know what she was saying, but I sat there alone and finished the whole film,” he recalls.
The movie simply showed an elderly woman inside a room delivering a monologue. In his own film, that monologue tells the story of time in China. “For me, I see modern China in two stages,” Wang notes. “The first stage is the thirty years from 1949 to 1980. China was in one state then. From 1980 to today, it is in another state, another way of living.”
The Cultural Trap of Modern China.
Believing that the tools to understand the present are buried in history, he relies on the past to explore his home’s modern struggles. He points to the period between 1949 and 1980 as the key to understanding the reality of people’s lives.
He notes a specific window of opportunity: “I was very lucky because from 2000 to 2010 — even up until 2016 or 2017 — there was a significantly larger space for freedom of speech compared to the past. Because of this, when I was filming stories from the past, many people were willing to be filmed and speak truthfully about what had happened. It was only possible during that brief fifteen-year window.”
Nowadays, however, political forces “sandbag” culture. People in China who seek rationality or cultural depth are forced by a government that favors consumerism. Wang describes this as “funny, low-level, tasteless… even this form of culture is used to control ordinary people.”
He continues: “In fact, ordinary people, in terms of their cultural life, live completely impoverished… I think some words would be too harsh to use, but [they live in] a very low-level kind of cultural consumption. So I think this is a political tool.”
He traces these problems back to the early 2000s, a time when people had hope for improvement, and personal decisions felt like they could oppose the political machine. Yet, with the passage of time, this changed: “We saw a prospect of improving our lives through our personal efforts. But now we suddenly discover, oh, this was actually a trap, a kind of design.”
Latest work: The Youth Trilogy.
His latest monumental work spans three films and exceeds 10 hours, telling a story deeply personal to the director about lives defined by labor. “When I was very young, I lived in the countryside… people there worked in the fields nonstop. To me, that was just daily life,” Wang recalls. “When I grew up… I still felt that most people’s lives revolved around daily work.” He notes that the characters in Youth reflect his origins: “My mother, my relatives, my neighbours — most people I know live like this, traveling to different cities to work all year round. It’s normal. I was just lucky to move away… and make films.”
The filming Process.
Wang works mostly alone, handling shooting and initial montage himself, with rare assistance from friends. He admits budget constraints often limit his artistic experiments: ‘I only manage a fraction of what I intended, and I end up having to give up on many of those ideas’. His process is exhaustive; Youth was shot over four years (2014–2018), yielding 2,500 hours of footage. What is amazing in the work of Wang Bing is how he implements the idea that the montage starts much before the editing room. Montage is in everything: in choosing subjects, shooting, re-elaborating the material before editing.
In this process, memory plays a crucial role. “All the important content is stored in your brain as memory,” Wang describes. “During filming, you gradually build that mental record. By the time filming is done, I don’t go back and watch all 2,500 hours to figure out the narrative structure. Instead, the story has already formed in my mind during the process.”
Future Projects
Wang remains pragmatic about the shrinking space for expression. “So I go film subjects that I can film,” he says. “This kind of freedom is becoming less and less common. I do what I can.”
Viktor Smolkin
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