“In terms of general mood, they are all very similar. These are private firms; the working hours are extremely long, from 8 am to 11 pm, with two breaks of an hour each for lunch and dinner. Otherwise, it’s just long hours of work. Workers’ wages are computed on a piece-rate basis, and paid out every six months. The problem is you start making a particular item of clothing without knowing how much each item is going to be paid, that’s something you only find out at the end. In other words, there’s no way of knowing what you’ll get at the end of the season. Although I didn’t yet have any clear idea of what sort of film I was going to make, I did know, as early as 2015, that it would focus on Zhili and radiate out from there. I also wanted to travel back with my characters to their home towns and villages, either filming them or just on vacation, which meant traveling up to two thousand kilometers upriver. It was on those trips that I really began to understand life in the Yangtze basin and among the people living on its banks. The film took years to make not just because I shot so much, but also because I needed time to understand the spirit and lifestyles of a region that was foreign to me.” (Wang Bing)