Buying
wholesale sure seems like the thing to do in China these days and the Yiwu
International Trade City is the place to do it. Jessica Kingdon takes viewers
inside the sprawling wholesale mall to see tomorrow’s dollar store merchandise
today, as well as the people who sell it in the short documentary Commodity City (trailer here), which premiered
at the 2017 Slamdance Film Festival.
Commodity is definitely the
sort of film that could be programmed by the FSLC’s Art of the Real series.
However, unlike most non-narrative docu-essays, it is surprisingly bright and
colorful. It is slightly surreal to see the various merchants surrounded by cascading
plastic flowers and the like, but nobody can fault their merchandising.
Nor
can Commodity be casually dismissed
as poverty porn. There is a lot of life going on in the mall—and a number of
sales are made. Some of the sales staff are pretty attractive and many have
their children in tow. Who knows what their margins are, but the Yiwu market is
exactly the sort of place where they can make it up in volume, as they say.
