'Ascension' review: Documentary examines the growing class divide in China.
Everything we use every day is the product of someone else’s labor. Cellphones and computers, water bottles and plastic cutlery, soap dispensers and blankets are all items in one gigantic interconnected chain of global capitalism that the documentary “Ascension” explores with curiosity, candor and criticism.
The locations and people featured go mostly unnamed. There are no academics or bureaucrats explaining how the Chinese economy works. That lack of specific identification doesn’t make the documentary’s overall effect any less direct. Instead, in its devotion to capturing the gap between the demands of labor and individual reactions to it, “Ascension’s” atmosphere is more impressionistic, more revelatory and more humane.
Workers complete countless specialized tasks to bring binoculars, fake Christmas trees and jean shorts to market: screwing the eyepieces onto binocular arms, bundling stacks of prickly green faux pine boughs and stamping metal accents into denim waistbands. The rhythm with which they do this is spellbinding, while the arguments workers have with middle managers trying to cheat them out of overtime are enraging .
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