“Arriving as a complete stranger in Zhili, I found a checkerboard of streets honeycombed with small garment-making workshops. But I had friends only 60 km away in the historic town of Suzhou, one of whom, a poet, introduced me to some people from Zhili, including workshop managers. One contact led to another, and pretty soon I had the run of the place. I could wander in and out of the factories and dormitory blocks without anyone stopping me or asking me what I was doing there. I never counted the streets, but there are around 20,000 workshops in that one town. Initially I hadn’t even thought about how many weeks or months of shooting I would need, or how long the film would be. I had enough money to cover six months’ work, but what I found was so intense that I ended up filming there over several years, from 2014 to 2019, amassing 2600 hours of rushes capturing the working lives of a huge cast of characters. In 2018 we started sorting this material, and in the spring of 2019, I decided I had shot enough and the time had come to begin editing. Then Covid hit, and everything stopped, so it wasn’t until 2021, when I came back to Paris, that I was able to start seriously working on the film.” (Wang Bing)