In a departure from so many documentaries that take on more than they can chew, Ascension’s wanderings throughout China are purposeful and often mesmerizing. It’s a lot to ask a filmmaker to take a 97-minute snapshot of a country. Yet the result is a tight, impactful look of the ongoing changes as a culture becomes more consumer oriented and materialistic, as seen here. (Filmed in 2019, clearly before the pandemic, there are no face masks anywhere onscreen.)

More than once a viewer might ask, how did director Jessica Kingdon gain access to all the corners she films. No one seems uninhibited or timid in front of her camera—in a bodyguard training school, the student slowest in the draw is punished by having to do push-ups, during which the instructor kicks him in the stomach. As the film traverses through 51 locations, it turns viewers into eavesdroppers.

The film’s star is the editor (Kingdon). Each cut directs your attention here and there, and every sequence adds to the briskly paced mosaic. The arresting images—often wide shots of what first look like geometrical shapes—come first. They are supported by a subtle score by Dan Deacon, which varies from heavy use of strings to electronic music that calls to mind some of Giorgio Moroder’s best film work.

In the opening montage of outdoor job recruiting fairs, employers hire right then and there. (Foxconn offers pay of $32 a day.) Via loudspeakers, a company admonishes potential applicants that neither tattoos nor hair coloring is allowed. The recruiters are nothing if honest. If hired, some job employees will be roomed four to a dorm room but no more than eight. (An air-conditioned factory acts as another incentive.) The honesty of the companies may come across as a bit brutal—one loudspeaker warns applicants they should be at least 18 years of age but no older than 38, not even by a day. Ouch.

What makes the film fascinating is not knowing what the director will spotlight next. The camera ventures to all types of factories, from a poultry packing plant to at least one textile factory, the home of a line of Keep America Great items. An aerial view of a graveyard of bikes implies the implosion of the gig economy of delivery workers, which was touched upon in the recent documentary The Gig Is Up, which also featured a Chinese cemetery of cycles.

Following that are sequences of the hypnotic, repetitive motion of assembly lines at work, such as one knife after another getting imprinted with the company logo—while the worker splits her focus between handling the knives and watching a cop show on her smartphone.

In a segment that could be a short film all to itself, Kingdon ventures into a factory that methodically manufactures lifelike plastic female sex dolls, which includes discussions on the making of the genitalia and the formation of huge breasts. (By the way, lighter paint is necessary for an areola.)  It’s a scene like something out of an R-rated Metropolis.

You too can be a success, no matter how ordinary you are, according to the teacher of a class on becoming an influencer, or “star boss,” which emphasizes how to “monetize your personal brand.” The flip side to this instructor’s optimism is Liza Mandelup’s documentary Jawline, on Hulu, where a Tennessee teenager also aspires to become rich and famous via social media.

Downton Abbey fans, prepare to swoon and learn some of the posh do’s and don’ts in a class for butlers. However, the students are warned they may not have time for a life, and are advised to pretend to be obedient; let the boss humiliate you, “You can curse him behind his back.”

Any direct political commentary lightly flows throughout, yet a scene of three butler trainees reflects, or perhaps rationalizes, a certain type of work ethic, as a woman expresses to her taciturn colleagues: “Foreign countries accuse China of denying human rights because they see China as a dictatorship. But there’s still so much economic inequality in our country, so the poor must first focus on survival. If you can’t survive, how can human rights exist?”

Ascension well deserved its award for Best Documentary Feature as well as the Albert Maysles New Documentary Director Award for Kingdon at this year’s Tribeca Festival. Though the nonfiction section has consistently been Tribeca’s strong suit, this year’s prize has more of an art-house sheen than some of the previous, more investigative or personal profile winners.