Bitter Money
(Ku Qian)

Awarded the Orizzonti prize for the best screenplay at the last Venice Mostra, Bitter Money is Wang Bing’s thirteenth feature in thirteen years. It is not difficult to grasp the resistant perseverance of the greatest documentarian of contemporary China with respect to his country’s transformations. As long as there are people who are invisible, abused, struggling to survive or searching for a better life (but most often to no avail), there will always be reasons to film, to be present. Many men and women circulate in this “bitter” film, where we travel from Yunnan Province to southwestern China to enter the east-coast city of Huzhou, now a magnet for migrants seeking work in the garment industry. We arrive there following a fifteen-year-old girl from the Yunnan countryside, the epicenter of all the filmmaker’s more recent films. Like her, Wang Bing is engulfed in the flow of local workers as he discovers a labyrinth of galleries harbouring precarious living conditions, exploitation and extreme situations. Through a skillful editing that eschews artificial storylines, a noisy accumulation of characters and situations brings us face to face with a brutal reality – steeped in blackness, like the screen when the film is over. AR