The Buoy Era

“Who, exactly, are we working piece by piece for in this life?”

In 1998, Chen Jianguo, a deputy factory director, converts his coworkers’ years of service into numbers during the reform of state-owned enterprises, and with his own hands dismantles the faith he has held for half his life.

In 2015, his son Chen Rui is thriving in the internet advertising industry, selling the myth of “financial freedom,” only to discover that he is merely a high-level component on the production line of consumerism.

In 2023, documentary director Su Qing and Chen Rui try to build a sense of “neighborliness” on the edges of the city, using barter to resist algorithmic pricing. But they discover that the hardest bargain is making peace with their own desires.

Three generations, one “experiment in living” spanning twenty-five years.

When everything can be priced and everything optimized, might those moments that cannot be measured by KPIs, late-night conversations, useless skills, and holding fast when you know you’ll lose, be the only proof that we ever existed?