Merry Christmas, Yiwu

Even though China does not celebrate Christmas, there are over 600 Christmas-decoration factories in Yiwu, China. They are often run as a family business and manufacture year round, employing people from across the country. This observational documentary focuses on several of them, located in and around Yiwu. There are no high-tech machines, just people working really hard putting glitter on baubles, pom poms on Christmas hats and assembling Father Christmases. The camera trails the workers at the factory and elsewhere – their conversations, love issues, a game of pool, shopping and eating, and the calls home, far away from Yiwu's prosperity. People joke about child labour in China, complain about the heat, but basically everyone seems to accept this artificial, surreal society where your colleagues are your new family and the factory is home. A portrait without voice-over of a place created where communism and globalism intersect and transform one another. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)