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Chinese director Wang Bing found joy in latest film “Youth (Spring),” focusing on young textile workers. But as he continues to work on his trilogy, things might get a bit darker.

“Their age is one of the factors here: they are so young and it’s just a happy time in your life. You are experiencing so many things, for example romantic relationships. Their actions are not entirely controlled by rationality, which made for vivid footage,” he tells Variety ahead of traveling to IDFA, where he is this year’s Guest of Honor.

“But here’s the thing – this trilogy is not finished yet. I will finish the second and third part by 2024 and they are not the same [as the first]. Maybe when it is completed, it will feel completely different?”

Despite winning multiple awards over the years, including Locarno’s Golden Leopard for “Mrs. Fang,” making films hasn’t necessarily gotten easier,...

Chinese documentarian Wang Bing and UK filmmaker and artist Peter Greenaway will be honored at the 36th International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), running from November 8 to 19.

Wang has been invited as the edition’s Guest of Honor, while Greenaway will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.

As part of its celebration of Wang, IDFA will screen his ground-breaking 2002 work Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks as well as his more recent films Man in Black and Youth (Spring), which both premiered to acclaim in Cannes this year. The latter title, which revolves around Chinese garment workers, was recently acquired by Icarus for North America.

The Wang program also includes Alone (2012), ’Til Madness Do Us Part (2013), and Mrs. Fang (2017).

The director will give a masterclass and has also been invited to compile the festival’s annual Top 10, which will...

Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing is this year’s Guest of Honor at IDFA, which holds its 36th edition from Nov. 8 to 19 in Amsterdam. IDFA is also honoring filmmaker and artist Peter Greenaway with a Lifetime Achievement Award, a selective retrospective and an extensive on-stage talk.

IDFA will highlight Wang’s “innovative prowess” – in the festival’s words – through a curated selection of his work. His masterpiece “Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks” (2002) heralded a new era for Chinese documentary film, “granting viewers an organic view of contemporary China free from any exotic gaze.”

IDFA is also screening Wang’s “Man in Black” and “Youth (Spring),” two films that premiered earlier this year in Cannes, and which “demonstrate the filmmaker’s vision and capacity for innovation,” IDFA said.

Other film screenings will be “Alone” (2012), “’Til Madness Do Us Part” (2013), and “Mrs. Fang” (2017).

Wang will also give an indepth Master Talk.

Rights to ‘Man in Black,” one of two documentary films by China’s Wang Bing to appear in Official Selection at Cannes this year, have been picked up by specialty sales agency Asian Shadows.

The 60-minute film, which will debut as a special screening, is a portrait of 86-year-old Wang Xilin, one of China’s most important modern classical composers and is now lives in exile in Germany. It was made in close collaboration with French cinematographer Caroline Champetier, whose credits include Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors,” Amos Gitai’s “Promised Land” and Andre Techine’s “Alice and Martin.”

During the 1960s, when China’s Cultural Revolution forced intellectuals into the fields and stripped the middle classes of their wealth, Wang Xilin was the was the target of severe persecution, including beatings, imprisonment and torture. The film examines the body and soul of a man scarred by a life of suffering,...