The Dream Factory (Jiafang yifang)

(China, 1997, 35mm, 90 min.)

Director: Feng Xiaogang
Cast:You Ge, Xiaogang Feng, Bei Liu, Bing He

Four young friends who are freelance workers in the film industry in Beijing take advantage of their talents in creating illusions and organizing unusual arrangements to form a company that makes the clients' dreams come true for one day. The first client requests are very comical, but sensing trouble down the road, the friends decide to only honor clients with good intentions. At the end of the year, when they look back, the friends find that they have given away a lot of sweet dreams, and learned a lot of life lessons that can only happen in Beijing...

Director's Biography

Born in the late 1950s, Feng Xiaogang is a native of Beijing and the son of a Communist Party college professor and a factory nurse. Feng learned his craft not through film school (like many of the Chinese filmmakers). He worked his way up from the production side of television, then started writing scripts. After eight years as a scene painter with an army theatrical troupe, he found a job in the art department of a TV station. In 1991 he adapted a novel about contemporary Chinese immigrants' lives in the United States, then went to New York to direct it, resulting in the highly popular television series Beijingers in New York aired in China in 1992. The TV series gave Feng Xiaogang what he had long wanted - it established him as a director. As the hottest commercial film director in China, Feng started to make a series of "New Year Celebration Movies" in 1996, with Part A Part B (Jiafang yifang, 1997) as the first, Be There or Be Square (Bujian busan, 1998) as the second, Sorry, Baby (Meiwan meiliao, 1999) as the third, and A Sigh (Yisheng tanxi, 2000) as the fourth. Unlike arthouse darlings Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, Feng is a new species in China: an out-and-out commercial filmmaker whose goal is only to entertain the biggest audience he can reach.