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.
Media Partner
China
2025
In Chinese with English subtitles
Book Tickets
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)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Grapes of Wrath
In this Film Studies workshop, Devan Scott explores the purposes of three-point lighting and the influence of German Expressionism on Hollywood studio filmmaking. Followed by a screening of The Grapes of Wrath, photographed by Gregg Toland.
The Last One for the Road
Two middle-aged drunkards drive across the Veneto region on a freewheeling bender, taking a young college student along for the ride. A celebration of the spirit of drink and the kinds of stories told around a table of old friends and too much wine.
Blue Heron
In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha and her Hungarian immigrant family relocate to a new home on Vancouver Island. Their fresh start is interrupted by increasingly dangerous behaviour from Jeremy, the family’s oldest child.
How Deep Is Your Love
Filmmaker Eleanor Mortimer tags along with a team of oceanographers and marine biologists as they survey the Clarion-Clipperton fracture, one of the most remote spots on Earth, home to a dazzling array of unknown creatures.
Amrum
Twelve-year-old Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck) sets himself a mission to secure bread and honey for his mother to snap her out of her depression. It is 1945. The war is all but lost, and such luxuries are not easy to find on the remote island of Amrum...