China's Jewelry City: Meilong

A single engraved line, a lifetime of ups and downs, and eternity forged between reality and illusion.

> A tarnished silver ring rejected by the supply and marketing cooperative, and a clumsy engraved line: these are all the dignity Chen Qitai, a silversmith in Meilong Town, has in 1983. The sharp snap of his wife Lin Hongmei cutting the gold chain from her dowry and throwing it into the furnace ignites a town-wide gold-plating craze, while also planting the seeds of greed. A boy swallows pills on the night gold prices soar. A lifesaving mold is handed over amid the crackdown on counterfeit goods. Their son uses 3D printing to recreate the twin lotuses his father carved by hand...

> Three decades of hardship and change temper fate in fire and tears. As new EU regulations loom like a wall of ice and the illusory glow of the metaverse dazzles the world, the veteran craftsman Chen Qitai and his son Chen Li build a “bridge between reality and illusion” across the divide between eras. They use the tiny marks left by calloused hands on titanium alloy as a key, allowing cold code to bloom into a “dance of stardust” that carries the memories of life.

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> This is no simple industrial epic, but a sweeping allegory about “roots and flowers,” “reality and illusion,” and “life and death.” Watch an engraved line flow into a river of stars, and a speck of stardust reflect the joys and sorrows of humanity. In the collision of furnace and code, witness the stirring journey of a Chinese small-town artisan family as they preserve the marks of life and let an eternal light shine along the boundary between reality and illusion. The roots are in the earth, the flowers in the sky. Stardust never fades, and the source never ceases.