A young man starts at a factory and wants to leave by the next morning.
Asked why, he says the air conditioning is too cold. Told to switch it off, he says his coworkers will mind. Told to mention it to them, he says never mind.
This is one of the workers director Li Yifan met in the Pearl River Delta. Li says workers born after 2000 are very different from those born in the 1990s: they have a strong sense of self, and they are also more fragile.
Why not dance follows the workers who came after the shamate generation.

After finishing Shamate, I Love You, Li Yifan returned to the Pearl River Delta twice, in 2024 and 2025. He found that factories had shifted from stable employment to order-based production, that automation and semi-automation had reached small factories, and that labor agencies were everywhere. Young workers make sense of themselves through phones, short videos, information feeds, and work relationships that keep shifting.
Why not dance is released in two parts. Why not dance 2 was shot entirely on a phone. Li Yifan brought a Sony R4 and an S3 camera and never took either out. He found that in an age of image overload, many of the methods he had used to make documentaries no longer work.
“And I don’t really care anymore whether this thing ends up being a ‘documentary’ or not,” Li says. “What matters to me is expressing what I see. I want to express how they understand themselves.”
(The above is quoted from Documentary Commune’s interview “Interview with Li Yifan: ‘I no longer care whether this ends up being a documentary.’”)
Blue House has received Li Yifan’s authorization to screen Why not dance in Berlin at 2:00 pm on October 10. After the screening, there will be a live video Q&A with Li Yifan.

About the Director

Li Yifan was born in 1966 in Wuhan, Hubei, and graduated from the Central Academy of Drama in 1991. He now lives in Chongqing and has long taught at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. He is both a documentary director and an artist. His major works include Before the Flood (2005), Village Archive: Longwang Village 2006 Video Files (2009), and Shamate, I Love You (2019). Before the Flood won the Wolfgang Staudte Award at the Berlinale Forum and the Grand Prize in the International Competition at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. In 2024 he held the solo exhibition “Omniscient Incapacity” in Beijing and began using AI tools systematically in his work.

Event Details

Date: Saturday, October 10, 2026
Time: 14:00 to 16:00
Venue: Blue House Berlin Living Room (the exact address will be sent after registration)
Film: Why not dance 1 & 2 (about 50 minutes; a live video conversation between the director and the audience follows the screening)
Language: Chinese (Mandarin)
Subtitles: Chinese and English
Registration: Free admission. Space in the living room is limited. If you would like to join, please scan the QR code on the poster and fill out the registration form. After you register successfully, we will email you the event details. If you do not receive a reply, we ask for your understanding.