Since the late '80s,
documentarian Sue Williams has been tracking the evolving Chinese culture,
starting with a quartet of films about China in the 20th century—from
pre-Mao to post-Tiananmen—and then moving on to a series of documentaries
about contemporary life. Young & Restless In China is the first of a planned
five-part series that will follow nine diverse Chinese citizens over the course
of 20 years. Once a year since 2004, Williams has checked in with a
tailored-shirt salesman, an Internet-café owner, a factory worker, an activist
lawyer, a hotelier, a doctor in training, a housewife, a marketing executive,
and a rapper. Young & Restless culls from the first four years of the project,
as all nine of them—all of whom are under 40—deal with starting
their own careers and families in a society very much in flux.
Williams is a
straightforward filmmaker, more in the mold of a journalist than an artist or
essayist. Young & Restless is heavy on the interviews (most of them dubbed
into English), intercut with just a little slice-of-life footage. But while the
film tells much more than it shows, what it tells is worth hearing. The current
conventional wisdom holds that the recently opened markets in China have turned
the nation into a capitalist paradise, where any crafty entrepreneur can get rich.
But the subjects of Young & Restless explain that nothing gets done in their
business world without some government palms getting greased, and they also
talk about how much of their idealism got crushed when the student democracy
movement was steamrollered in the late '80s, and how China is still a place
where human trafficking takes place with the tacit approval of the nation at
large.
Yet while Williams pays
attention to the particular problems of doing business in China—like
whether an advertising logo should be more red, to please the state, or less
red, to please communism-weary consumers—she's just as interested in how
work, technology, and modernization are impacting her subjects' personal lives.
For all the stress about the coming Olympics and human-rights violations, Young
& Restless
makes it clear that for the Chinese themselves, their problems are much more
personal: how to make their parents happy, how to keep a relationship alive,
and how to make enough money to keep up with the changes all around them.