North American Premiere
Set inside a Lenovo electronics factory in Wuhan during and after the COVID-19 outbreak, Factory offers a chilling look at labour, surveillance, and the machinery of global capitalism. Employees live, eat, and work in a sealed corporate ecosystem where care infrastructures double as systems of control. While workers on the floor endure long, repetitive shifts, middle managers scramble to interpret shifting rules, squeezed between exhausted staff and elusive corporate higher-ups.
Hao Zhou, a veteran documentarian with roots in photojournalism, has deemed documentary filmmaking “a study of human behavior.” In Factory, he resists sensationalism in favor of immersive observation, and his static, unflinching camera captures the numbing rhythms of assembly line life where both managers and workers become cogs in a self-replicating machine. With a runtime nearing two and a half hours, the repetition becomes the point — Factory is less a pandemic documentary than a work of durational ethnography. A stark portrait of global supply chains and the human toll they quietly extract.
China
2025
In Chinese with English subtitles
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Credits & Director
Producer
Coral He
Cinematography
Yuan Zhe
Editor
Evita YuePu Zhou
Hao Zhou 周浩
Zhou Hao is a documentary filmmaker who has worked as a journalist for more than a decade, producing documentaries since 2001. Zhou’s works have screened and won awards at film festivals around the world, including her films Cotton (2014) and The Chinese Mayor (2015), which both won Best Documentary at the Golden Horse Film Festival for their respective years. The Chinese Mayor also won the Special Jury Award for Unparalleled Access at the 31st Sundance Film Festival, and Best Documentary at the 9th Asian Film Awards.
Filmography: The Transition Period (2010); Emergency Room China (2013); Mian hua (2014); The Chinese Mayor (2015); All In (2021)
Insights
See more films in this series
Factory
Shot inside a Lenovo factory in Wuhan, Factory is a chilling study of life under global capitalism. Hao Zhou captures a world of control, exhaustion, and quiet revolt. where employees work under surveillance and time itself becomes a mechanism of power.
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Image: © The New York Times