Restless Farewell
China | Film 90min, TV 50min | 4K | Color
Logline
Third-generation migrant workers, who were left out of the system, seek a meager salary and fragile friendships. Gen-Z developed their self-awareness on the assembly line and TikTok, approaching the end of their youth. Will they escape from their parents’ fate?
Synopsis
Four 20-year-olds meet while evading a job at factories. Recruitment via TikTok proved to be more reliable than in the labor market. They join a world-class company, which offers meals and bedding. Here the young workers engage in intense labor and emotional output, only to be replaced eventually.
They shuttle between the restaurant and dorms, killing time in mobile games and online gambling. Earning $22 for cleaning 236 tables. Those who have never been loved have to perform passion for strangers.
In the manufacturing hub, the system hides economic inequality with sophistication. The Gen-Z migrant workers try to escape the system but are shaped by algorithms. With nothing but their bodies as tools, how will they stride toward the future before their youth runs out?
Director's Statement
When I met Su, he’d just failed a Disney security guard interview, craving meat and mocking his companion’s idealism. In Shanghai’s vast labor market, most young migrants, lacking education, are traded as “human resources.” They can’t endure factory life like their parents but remain trapped, longing for escape. Isolated and exhausted, their dreams play out online as reality drains them. Our film captures their restless youth—friendships shift with each job, love is out of reach, and self-awareness emerges. In the world’s factory, their youth is both their own and the system’s, as they struggle to break free before time runs out.
Director YANG Nan
Yang Nan graduated from Fudan University and the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a journalist and has repeatedly won various journalism awards in China. She was awarded 2023 Asia Journalism Fellowship in Singapore. Since 2020, she joined in documentary filmmaking. Restless Farewell, considered the best pitch in CCDF and SSD, is her first feature documentary.
Producer TSE Shuhao
Shuhao holds a degree in News&Doc from NYU and is a member of BAFTA, He is the winner of 49TH Student Oscar Gold Medal, 2022 BAFTA Student Film Award for Documentary & Special Jury Prize, also won Best Documentary Series in the 25th Shanghai TV Festival, and the Outstanding Domestic Documentary Series Award from the National Radio and Television Administration.