Documentary, 86 min.

by Villi Hermann

Switzerland, November 2008

Hermann’s film centers on Swiss photographer Andreas Seibert whose work focuses on the entire Asiatic territories. High-population centres of enormous size are springing up in China with dizzying speed. With them comes an increased demand for migrant workers in the construction sector, factories, and mines. In growth centres like the Pearl River Delta in Southern China, one hundred million people have already set out from rural, underdeveloped provinces to earn their living there. Seibert and Hermann accompanied the workers repeatedly in order to document their everyday lives and their journey back home. Their stories are told in a collection of striking photographs that provide a close-up portrait to complement the current discussion of economic growth in China. With its combination of photos and video images, this documentary film conveys a unique impression of the scale of this modern migration of peoples, the so called “mingong”, illegal migrant workers. His pictures depict individuals, not just faces lost in a Mao-blue crowd.