Set in North-East China, where the director Zhang Meng originates from, The Piano in a Factory brings us back in time, to China in the mid-80s, when the changes that over a period of twenty years radically transformed the society and the country are taking shape and are becoming manifest among the population.
Chen Guilin is a middle-aged man who works in one of the few steel factories that are still active in the city. Along with some friends he plays the accordion in a local band and his ambition is that his daughter inherits his passion for music. As a worker, Chen cannot afford to buy her a piano and can just about pay for her lessons. He does all he can to find his daughter a real piano on which she can practice. When his wife, who left him for a better life, returns to ask for a divorce and to take their daughter Xiao Yuan, Chen finds himself competing with his ex-wife for their daughter’s affection, who tells them she will go and live with the parent that will buy her a real piano.
For Chen being able to find a real piano for his daughter in order to keep her with him becomes his mission, a race against time in which he involves friends and colleagues, who are penniless like him and not very convinced that their efforts will be rewarded. After a disastrous attempt to take the school piano, encouraged to carry out the crazy venture after a night spent drinking and chatting, they are immediately arrested by the police. The accusations against them are withdrawn by the school which decides to consider their action more an act of bravado than a crime.
The gang, who gathered to return the piano left the night before in the middle of the school grounds, observe the structure of the piano and after experiencing another wave of enthusiasm decides to build a piano themselves. As they are not expert manufacturers or engineers, everyone improvises, willing to do anything to serve the just cause. The group is made up of a retired engineer who is able to decipher a Russian DIY piano instruction manual, a talented handyman who has just got out of prison, a steel supplier who is about to be sent to prison, a butcher friend and Chen’s girlfriend.
The piano starts to take shape from the factory scraps but before it is completed, putting aside his pride and obsession, Chen realizes that his daughter’s future and happiness deserve much more than an improvised assembling of scraps which only resembles a real piano but does not match the quality.
In an era which was about to change, the race for modernization leaves behind the stories of many people, whose dreams and ambitions have remained buried in the memory of those who want to remember them. The Piano in the Factory wants to remember them in this way.
Maria Ruggieri