The Dream Maker

Dreams in the Silt

There is a distinct subgenre in Chinese cinema and television often dismissed by Western critics as "Main Melody"—works commissioned to celebrate national progress. These narratives frequently suffer from a fatal lack of friction, presenting history as a smooth, inevitable ascent. However, with *The Dream Maker* (2026), director Sun Hao—fresh from the stylish intrigue of *Joy of Life*—subverts this expectation by focusing not on the gleaming skyline of the finished city, but on the suffocating, visceral mud from which it was birthed. This 40-episode saga, which premiered this January, is less a celebration of policy than a brutal, beautiful study of the sheer kinetic energy required to build a civilization on a tidal flat.

Sun Hao’s visual language here is a startling departure from the polished interiors of his previous work. He trades the silk robes of court dramas for the coarse cotton and rubber boots of the 1980s reform era. The camera does not glide; it wades. The cinematography emphasizes the tactile hostility of the environment in Pingchuan County. When the protagonists look out at the land they intend to transform into "Yuehai Town," the screen is filled with gray, relentless silt. The visual landscape creates a suffocating sense of reality where the mud is not just a setting, but the primary antagonist. We feel the dampness, the exhaustion, and the improbability of the dream.



At the narrative’s center is Li Qiuping, played with a ferocious, grounded intensity by Zhao Liying. For years, Zhao has been shedding the "idol" skin of her early career, but here the transformation is complete. She plays Qiuping not as a starry-eyed dreamer, but as a pragmatic force of nature. There is a specific scene in the first act—widely discussed for its raw emotional blocking—where Qiuping stands amidst a skeptical crowd of farmers, her voice cracking not from weakness but from the sheer weight of her conviction. She argues for the "fund-raising and partnership" model not as an economic theory, but as a matter of survival. Opposite her, Huang Xiaoming’s Zheng Decheng provides a necessary ballast. His performance is quiet, internal, and weary, embodying the immense administrative and moral burden of leading a people who have been disappointed by promises before.

The script, adapted from Zhu Xiaojun’s novel, wisely sidesteps the trap of making the bureaucracy the hero. Instead, it focuses on the friction between the old world and the new. The central conflict is not Man vs. State, but the collective will vs. inertia. The series excels in portraying the "partnership" model not as a dry policy loophole, but as a high-stakes gamble with human lives as the collateral. The dialogue is stripped of slogans, replaced by the heated, circular arguments of people terrified that their ambition will drown them.



Ultimately, *The Dream Maker* succeeds because it treats the act of city-building as a form of madness. It asks the audience to understand the audacity required to look at a wasteland and see a metropolis. By the time the skyline begins to rise, the victory feels earned not because the history books say it happened, but because we have watched these characters bleed into the foundations. Sun Hao has crafted a work that argues the true monument is not the city itself, but the human spirit that refused to sink into the silt. In an era of cynical media, this unvarnished look at human labor is a resonant, necessary piece of art.