Blue Velvet Dust

In 1999, a wind called “wealth” blew the Cheng brothers from Sichuan to Guangzhou. In the denim factory in Xintang, the air was forever filled with a kind of blue lint, which clung to the workers’ lungs and also embedded itself in their destinies.

As a typical Chinese family trapped in constant inner conflict, every member of the Cheng family struggles in the blue sea of the times, dragging one another down as well. The daughter, Cheng Weizhi, decides to wash away this entire shade of “blue” for good.

Her “spiritual cutting ties” is not a simple escape, but a resolve to, after the wreckage, explore the possibility of a new kind of family relationship. This is a tragic journey about how we transform from “children of the land” into “workers in factories,” and finally into “ourselves.”

The thirty-year rise and fall of the Cheng family is a microcosm of China’s passage from agrarian society to industrial civilization. This is not only a family struggle story, but also a profound epic of a generation, as it seeks individual dignity in the tide of the times, rebuilding itself from fragmentation.