Drudgery and dance lessons – work-life balance and the ‘Chinese Dream’

The so-called Chinese Dream is a living ideal for Qian Anhua, a textiles factory owner who describes his enterprise as one that can ‘feed my soul and the soul of my workers’. While the work is menial and quarters cramped at his factory in Hangzhou, China, the monotony of assembly-line labour is offset by group leisure activities such as dance classes and Catalan castell-building. The workers themselves seem appreciative of the entertainment, but their private musings hint at a more complex set of goals and desires than can be easily satisfied by the programme of regimented work and organised fun. An offbeat portrait of modern China, Take Me to the Moon follows a factory veteran and a new arrival as they navigate their hopes and dreams in a peculiarly constructed world, where the borders between work and private life are blurred, and home is far away.