Youth

Youth (芳华, 2017) is Feng Xiaogang's sweeping historical drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. The setting is a People's Liberation Army song-and-dance troupe in 1970s China, where a new recruit named He Xiaoping arrives and never quite fits in.

The other girls freeze her out almost at once. When she borrows a uniform without asking just to mail a photo to her father, the whole barracks turns on her. The one person who treats her decently is Liu Feng, the troupe's tireless do-gooder, beloved right up until kindness stops being convenient. From there the film follows a generation of young performers through rehearsals, first love, a brutal stint at the front and the long peacetime years that scatter them.

Feng based the story on his own time in a military arts unit, and that lived memory shows — faded fatigues, a battlefield sequence held in one unbroken take, faces aging across decades. It is tender and unsparing at once, a film about how time grinds down the ideals you start out with. Stream Youth (2017) online on iFILM.