False Eden, real hell

Sometimes Cannes pulls a poker face and smacks a big surprise down on its famous red carpet, all without a blink or a wink. This year, it comes in the form of a three-and-a-half-hour documentary about Chinese sweatshop workers, shot entirely in a crummy garment district on the mainland’s eastern coast.

This is Youth (Spring), a film at once utterly simple and stubbornly audacious by doc-maker Wang Bing, and it’s featured in the Competition section — meaning the red-carpet treatment (without the dress code thankfully) and a projection in the festival’s Grande Theatre Lumiere. Youth (Spring) is the first documentary in 19 years — the previous one was Michael…