Blue Velvet Dust

In 1999, a wind called “wealth” blew the Cheng brothers from Sichuan to Guangzhou. In the denim factories of Xintang, blue lint hung perpetually in the air, settling in the workers’ lungs and embedding itself in their fates. In this quintessentially Chinese family, where everyone wears one another down, each member of the Cheng family struggles in the blue ocean of the times, even as they drag one another back. Their daughter, Cheng Weizhi, decides to wash this “blue” away for good. Her “spiritual severing of family ties” is no simple escape. After everything has fallen apart, she is determined to explore the possibility of a new kind of family relationship. This is a tragic, arduous journey about how we became “children of the land,” then “factory workers,” and ultimately, ourselves. The Cheng family’s thirty years of ups and downs reflect China’s journey from a rural society toward industrial civilization. This is not only a family’s history of struggle, but also a profound epic of a generation seeking individual dignity amid the tides of its time, moving from brokenness toward renewal.