60% of all Christmas decorations in the world are made in the Chinese city of Yiwu, a place of eternal Christmas-time, but where no one celebrates Christmas. An intoxicatingly gripping, slow-paced portrait of Yiwu and its workers, which enhances the irony of the city where even Christmas is manufactured.
Communist ideals have long lost their value in Yiwu, a city with 600 Christmas factories, in which Christmas as we know it is produced for the entire world. With rising wages, the workers in Christmas factories can now afford the newest iPhones, but they still live in crowded dormitories. All migrants in their own country, nostalgic for someplace far away, some miss their families left in hometowns, others miss their friends and lovers from the factories when they go home for holidays. The young generation is already tired of long factory hours, chemical fumes and glitter particles, and they do not care for their parents' wishes to get educated. Stuck in between Chinese tradition and the newly discovered Chinese dream, they want their own businesses, to be rich, to be independent, to be in love. In this melancholic, observational documentary, the alluring visual aesthetic enhances the geopolitical twist and the irony of modern-day China.
