In August this year, the film *Another Hopeful Day* was released. It is not only the most profound exploration of delivery work and algorithms in cinema, but also a rare and exceptional work of realism in recent years.
On 4 September, Foodthink invited the film’s director, Liu Taifeng, and producer, Zhu Tong, to record an episode of the “Food Talk” podcast. This article is a compilation based on the interview with Director Liu Taifeng.
Throughout the piece, the director expresses the social concerns that drove the creation of the film. The immense changes brought to society by algorithms are not just a problem for delivery riders; it could even be said that “we are all trapped in the algorithm”. Director Liu Taifeng hopes that the film can ultimately portray the hardships faced by different social classes and serve as a valuable record of this era.
Foodthink’s editors have previously recommended this film to our readers. It is currently still being screened in major cities; we welcome you to go and watch it and share your thoughts with us.
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Liu Taifeng
Director and Screenwriter of *Another Hopeful Day*
● A still from *Another Hopeful Day*. The film opens with a car accident: an algorithm engineer for a delivery platform hits one of his own riders, triggering crises in two families from vastly different social classes.
In 2021, while waiting at a red light at a crossroads in Beijing, I nearly hit a delivery rider.
It was summer, and as the countdown on the traffic light kept ticking, a feeling of irritation set in. Everyone around me was either running the red light or poised to launch the moment it changed. When the light finally turned green, I instinctively hit the accelerator. At that exact moment, a delivery rider—running the red light and heading the wrong way—skimmed past the front of my car, grazing the number plate. I could actually feel the physical force of his momentum transfer to me. If I had been a fraction of a second faster, I would have sent him flying.
A chill ran down my spine, and a thought suddenly struck me: if I had actually hit him, what legal liability would I bear? As a motor vehicle driver, I hadn’t seen the road conditions clearly, but he had run a red light in his haste to complete a delivery. The assignment of responsibility in such a case is quite nuanced.
As it happened, I had been wanting to make a film about the struggles of ordinary people that reflected social realities, but I needed the right entry point. Suddenly, all these elements converged in my mind. I said to my screenwriter, Cai Zhiling: “What if we write a script where a programmer who designs algorithms for an internet platform hits one of that platform’s own delivery riders? Let’s see what kind of story unfolds.” That was how the concept for the script was born.
From that moment, we began fleshing out the character relationships. I interviewed many delivery riders of different ages and genders—some who had been station managers, some who did dedicated deliveries, and others who worked via crowdsourcing. This kind of accumulation is an essential part of the creative process. My screenwriter spoke with friends working in big tech companies, and I chatted with neighbourhood cleaners and even elderly men walking their dogs. I gathered material from daily life through these open conversations, then slowly polished the script.
From the decision to take on the project to the start of filming, barely three months passed. We began shooting in Hangzhou in the summer of 2022, filming for a total of 40 days.
● Filmed in Hangzhou in the summer of 2022, the extensive use of real-life locations allows the audience to witness the rhythms of daily life during the pandemic on screen.
I. Is becoming a delivery rider really ‘zero cost’?
In reality, many of the ‘traps’ involved in being a delivery rider are invisible to outsiders. When recruiting riders online, the terms offered are usually ‘room and board provided’ and ‘zero-cost onboarding’—that is their sales pitch. They want as many applicants as possible. But joining isn’t actually free. For dedicated riders, there is a strict condition: you must give a month’s notice before leaving, and your salary for the final month is split 50/50 with the station. Consequently, once you join a dedicated team, you are committed for at least a month, contributing a month’s value to the station. The station owners are guaranteed a profit regardless of the circumstances; if someone decides after a while that the job isn’t for them, they’ve essentially worked that last month for free, with the money ending up in the station’s pocket.
Furthermore, the riders’ equipment is not provided by the station. Uniforms must be bought by the rider, and electric bikes and batteries are rented—behind this lies a vast industrial chain. Before joining, the station might say, ‘I’ll provide accommodation.’ In reality, they take you to a rental agency and have you sign a lease. You don’t pay for these things upfront, but they are deducted directly from your wages.
Thus, it is not zero-cost; rather, it forces you into debt so that you cannot easily leave. To get away, you effectively have to ‘ransom’ yourself.
● A delivery station holding a morning meeting by the roadside. The platform’s personnel management and order coordination all rely on these grassroots stations. Photo: TianleDuring the interviews, many station managers expressed a sense of helplessness, as they are under pressure from the platform’s performance reviews. The platform entrusts these stations to managers specifically because they can provide a steady stream of ‘fresh blood’. Beyond that, the platform takes no responsibility; they have no employment relationship with the riders. The contracts are merely partnership agreements, signed electronically on a phone. This makes it incredibly easy to exploit loopholes, as it is virtually impossible to read every word carefully. Yet, this single contract governs the riders’ future labour protections and accident compensation. However, most job seekers have only one goal: to start earning money immediately. Every other concern comes second. For most of the riders I interviewed, this job is either a transition in their lives or a way to quickly accumulate a sum of disposable cash in a short period.
In the film, I wrote the following lines for Weili:
“It’s just a part-time gig. Do you know how many registered riders there are in the world? If the company provided social security and housing funds for every single one of them, would the business even survive? They do it voluntarily—earning money per delivery. If they don’t take an order, they can rest. They don’t have to deal with the pressure of daily reports, weekly reports, or year-end performance reviews.”This is the price of part-time work: you have no relationship with the platform, and the partnership agreement is signed only with a third-party labour agency. We all know what a partnership agreement implies—no protections, including social security and housing funds. Some clauses are described by the riders as ‘bully terms’, because all the power rests with the employer. There is a specific detail here: riders pay a daily insurance fee of three yuan, but it only compensates for losses caused to others by the rider’s fault. If the fault lies with the other party, then that party’s insurance must pay. However, there is a third scenario: if a rider is injured due to their own fault, there is no solution. The rider receives no compensation, which is exactly the situation depicted in the film.
II. Everyone is Trapped in the Algorithm
In truth, the delivery riders and the platform’s algorithm engineers are merely the entry points for this film. Rather than saying the movie is about riders being trapped in an algorithm, it is more accurate to say that we are all trapped in the algorithm. Alongside the rider being knocked down, there is a parallel plotline: a programmer being made redundant. Both families exist within the landscape of contemporary urban China, yet different social classes—even when brushing past each other in daily life—hardly spare a glance for one another. Why? Because our own hectic work lives have made human relationships distant and cold, eventually curdling into an irreconcilable hostility.
One can imagine that if the accident had not occurred, this programmer would never have dealt with a delivery rider in his entire life. The system tells him that he must not interact with them, and that he must not allow sympathy for them to enter his professional life.
● In this scene, the programmer and the rider brush past each other in a lift, a scenario we all experience daily. Interestingly, in the final cut, none of the riders in yellow uniforms bear the Meituan name or logo.The algorithm engineer’s goal is to optimise the system; this is a behaviour driven by strong professional imperatives. His objective is not to study the plight of delivery riders in order to design a mechanism to protect them. A competent algorithm engineer must follow the logic of the algorithm to maximise commercial profit while avoiding labour disputes. In the film, the programmer Weili’s work pace is frantic; he has no time to consider the thoughts of others. He is weighed down by a few things: KPIs and performance reviews that determine whether he is promoted or sacked. He does not consider whether the algorithm causes harm, however slight, to others. He must have absolute faith in the work he does, because his environment demands that faith—otherwise, he is redundant.
It is only the moment he knocks down the delivery rider that a seed of doubt is planted. Initially, it isn’t directed at the algorithm, but rather a spark of humanity is ignited—a feeling that having hit this person, he must take some responsibility.
This process of awakening is slow. It would be unrealistic to suggest that such an algorithm engineer could truly stand in total opposition to the company. A university classmate asks him a soul-searching question: “At our age, is there any problem other than money?” Given this premise, the fact that he ultimately refuses the company’s high-paying offer to return is already a moment of human brilliance; he has realised that some things cannot be measured by money or material gain. Thus, facing the company’s offer, he says:
“People are not oranges. You can’t just eat the orange and throw the peel away.”In the end, although the wife of the rider, Jin Peng, chooses to cease treatment, the lawyer decides to shift the target of the lawsuit from the programmer to the platform. This is a tragedy, but it triggers a subconscious awakening in two people from entirely different social classes.
III. Where is the Value of Work
An elderly gentleman appears in the film. In his youth, he was a cinema projectionist, and he describes to Weili his time spent travelling to the countryside to show films to villagers, back when tickets were nearly impossible to find. Later, he experienced marketisation and was made redundant in the 1990s. This old man could represent any worker who lived through that era. He is telling Weili: “The redundancy you’ve witnessed, I have lived through too.” He tells him how proud he was of his profession in his youth, because he was serving the people; every task had value and meaning.
And now? Today, all the value we create is measured by profit. Yet the delivery rider in the film, who created that profit, lies in the ICU with no one to care for him. There is a dialogue in the film between Weili and the rider’s lawyer:
“We created this software—think of the convenience it has brought everyone. Do you order takeout when you work? How much time has it saved you? That is where its value lies; we have even introduced an entirely new way of living. You cannot deny this.” “I do not deny that you created value, but have you considered that the person who actually created that value is now lying in the ICU?”
Wei Li says that food delivery saves you time, and that is its value. But where does all this saved time actually go? You will find that there is never enough of it. Everyone longs for a moment of leisure outside of work—to travel happily with family and friends, or to do things that are truly meaningful. Yet, most of our time is consumed by so-called work or commuting, leaving us to squeeze our aspirations into fragmented scraps of time.
What are we rushing for every day? Compared to the past, we have smartphones and cars, but why are we so mentally exhausted? What is the price we are paying? This is what I want to convey to the audience through the film.
● Some behind-the-scenes photos. Many shots in the film were used to capture the reality of Hangzhou in 2022. Director Liu Taifeng mentioned in an interview that sitting by the roadside, observing and recording the lives of various ordinary people, was a vital way for him to gather creative material.
IV. The intensifying rat race
Two years have passed since the film was shot, and the situation in the food delivery industry has not improved; it has worsened. More people are entering the industry, and the rate per delivery continues to drop—I’ve heard that insurance which used to be three yuan has fallen to two and a half. A few days ago, during a roadshow in Shanghai, we went to a restaurant for soup dumplings. The shop had very high ratings on the platform. Once we arrived, the manager told us that if we simply checked in and wrote a positive review, each of us would receive a free side dish worth over ten yuan. After we did so, a table full of side dishes was brought out. The manager sighed and said, “I can’t help it; this is how every shop on this street operates now. If we don’t boost our ratings, they will slide, and the platform will stop promoting us.” However, when we tasted the main course, it wasn’t any good, despite the glowing reputation on the platform.
It is a vicious cycle, which is why the dine-in experience is getting worse. But I don’t blame the restaurants, because they are all trapped in the algorithm; if they don’t do this, they can’t make money. Many restaurant owners say that they lose money on every delivery order, but they do it just to maintain their customer base. If they don’t, they simply vanish from the platform.
● The catering industry under the platform economy: Data from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics shows that in the first half of 2024, the total profit of catering enterprises above a designated scale (annual revenue over 10 million yuan) was only 180 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 88.8%, with a profit margin as low as 0.37%. During the same period, Meituan’s local commerce revenue business reached 60.7 billion yuan, with an operating profit of 15.234 billion yuan and an operating profit margin of 25.1%. Photo: Tianle
The film industry is the same; the criteria for evaluating a movie or a TV series are also data-driven. This control can be as granular as every plot point, every scene, every character, and the choice of actors. They believe that if it is designed according to big data, the audience will inevitably buy into it. But where does this data and traffic come from? They can also find ways to “give away side dishes.” This is a universal phenomenon across all industries, though it is most prominent in food delivery.
In the past, restaurants could employ their own delivery drivers, adding a small delivery fee to each order to bring the meal home. Cinemas served their surrounding communities, and people would visit during holidays with prices clearly marked. At that time, neither restaurants nor cinemas struggled this much; the surrounding ecosystem was healthy.
What the platforms have done is consolidate all these resources. In reality, platforms don’t just profit from the businesses they operate; they value impressive financial reports and growth figures more. With these, the capital behind them and the operations on the stock market can bring dividends. I believe this is the underlying logic; beyond that, whether it is manual labour or intellectual labour, the value contributed is not that important. But now, those who optimise the algorithm and those who execute it are bound together on a giant war machine, hurtling forward in the name of profit.
A few years ago, when a meal took 40 minutes to arrive, we didn’t think it was slow. Now, if it’s not here in 20, we complain. This is a psychological shift. But it isn’t necessarily caused by us. Many consumers are patient; for example, if I know I want to eat in 40 minutes, can’t I just time my order accordingly? So why does this mindset exist? In fact, it is a powerful driving force that is slowly altering our way of thinking and our way of life. You could say these are already our consumption habits, but there is a problem beneath those habits.
I have spoken with many DiDi drivers and delivery riders; their frustration stems from unreasonable systems. These systems require extensive human-centric improvements—not just because riders and drivers work for a platform, but to restore the dignity they deserve as human beings.
As a film, *Another Day Full of Hope* can hardly change much or offer a fierce critique. This is a systemic problem. I have simply distilled the dilemmas we all encounter in life and placed them on the cinema screen, leaving there one giant question mark.
● Director Liu Taifeng working on set.
Unless otherwise stated, images are provided by the production team of *Another Day Full of Hope*
Liu Taifeng
