Director: Xunhui

Synopsis

My dream is to bring Chinese animation to a wider audience, but my mother firmly opposes it, so I leave home to make my own way. I meet others who are also chasing their dreams: Meng Mao, who loves painting but has never sold a single picture; Tu Ye, who wants to become a king of comedy but is deep in debt; and Ba Zhua, who wants to become a magician but keeps losing competitions. As failures, we keep each other warm. Tu Ye agrees to rent me a room, Meng Mao looks after my meals, and Ba Zhua offers to lend me money for a training course... It looks like a happy household, but each of us has hidden motives, and our dreams prove fragile in the face of survival. To serve his own interests, Tu Ye secretly sacrifices other people's dreams, and Ba Zhua fails his talent show. To survive, Ba Zhua uses magic tricks to steal on the street and ends up in prison. When I visit him, I ask whether the money he lent me was also stolen, but he tells me, "Meng Mao asked me to give it to you." The news stuns me: Meng Mao has never sold a painting, so where did the money come from? I rush back to our House of Dreams, only to find that Tu Ye has taken his own life under pressure from his creditors, and Meng Mao is nowhere to be found. Overnight, the House of Dreams is empty. Only I am still working desperately, until I collapse from exhaustion. When I wake up, I am back with my mother, who scolds me for being ruined by my dream. But what fills my mind now is no longer my dream; it is Meng Mao. Where is she? It turns out that the money Meng Mao asked Ba Zhua to give me was earned by selling her body. She did this because I had once saved her life without realizing it and given her hope in life and love. After being violated, Meng Mao decides to leave this world. Before taking her life, she destroys her drawing board, and then finds the line I once left on it to encourage her not to give up: "Live on, with dreams." From that moment, the fates of Meng Mao and me take another turn...