In August this year, the film Another Day Full of Hope hit cinemas. It is not only the film that has gone deepest and furthest into the subject of food delivery and algorithms, but also a rare realist masterpiece 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 together. This article has been compiled from the interview with director Liu Taifeng.
In this article, the director shares the social concerns that lie behind the film’s creation. The enormous changes that algorithms have wrought on society are not something only delivery riders face; indeed, one might say that “everyone is trapped in the algorithm”. Director Liu Taifeng hopes that the film can ultimately portray the dilemmas faced by people at different levels of society, and leave a precious record of our times.
Foodthink’s editors have already recommended this film to our readers. It is still showing in cinemas across major cities, and we warmly welcome you to go and watch it, and share your thoughts with us.
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Liu Taifeng
Director and screenwriter of Another Day Full of Hope
● A still from Another Day Full of Hope. The film unfolds from a traffic accident: an algorithm engineer at a food delivery platform knocks down one of his own company’s riders, unravelling the crises of two families from different social strata.
In 2021, while waiting at a red light at a Beijing intersection, I nearly knocked over a food delivery rider.
It was summer. The countdown numbers on the traffic lights kept flickering, and a creeping sense of irritation set in. Everyone around me was either running the red light or poised to dash off the moment it changed. When the green light came on, I reflexively pressed the accelerator — and at that very instant a delivery rider, having run the red light and come hurtling against the traffic, shot past the front of my car so close that he grazed the number plate. I could feel the force of his body transferring through to mine. Had it been even a fraction of a second faster, I would have knocked him straight off his bike.
A chill ran down my spine, and one thought struck me at once: if I really had knocked him down, what legal liability would I bear? As a motorist, I had not checked the road conditions properly, but he had run the red light to rush a delivery. The delineation of responsibility in such a case is extraordinarily subtle.
As it happened, I had long wanted to make a film about people’s livelihoods, reflecting social reality, but I needed a fitting point of entry. All these elements clicked together in my mind in that instant. I turned to the screenwriter beside me, Cai Zhiling, and said: shall we write a script about a programmer who designs algorithms for an internet platform, who then knocks down a delivery rider from that very same platform — and see what kind of story unfolds? The premise of the screenplay was born right there.
From that moment, we began fleshing out the characters and their relationships. I went out and visited many delivery riders of different ages and genders — some who had served as station managers, some doing dedicated delivery, some doing crowdsourced delivery. This kind of immersion is an essential part of the filmmaking process. My co-writer also chatted with friends working at major internet companies, while I talked to the cleaning staff in my housing estate, and even the old men walking their dogs. Through open-ended conversations, we gathered material from everyday life, then slowly shaped the script.
Less than three months passed between deciding to take on the project and the first day of filming. We began shooting in Hangzhou in the summer of 2022, with a total of 40 days of filming.
● The film was shot in Hangzhou in the summer of 2022, with extensive location work allowing audiences to see everyday life during the pandemic on the big screen.
I. Is Being a Delivery Rider Really “Zero-Cost”?
In truth, many of the traps waiting for people who become delivery riders are invisible from the outside. When riders are recruited online, the advertised terms always promise meals and accommodation — “zero-cost onboarding” — that is their slogan. They want as many applicants as possible. But signing on is not actually free. A hard condition for dedicated delivery is that you must give a full month’s notice before you leave, and the wages for your final month must be split fifty-fifty with the station. So the moment you join a dedicated-delivery team, you are locked in for at least one month, providing a month’s worth of value to the station. The station’s income is guaranteed come rain or shine. Some people work for a while, decide they cannot keep it up, and that final month becomes unpaid labour — the money simply falls into the station’s pocket.
All the equipment riders need is not handed out by the station, either. Uniforms must be purchased by the rider; electric bikes and batteries must be rented. Behind it all sits a vast supply-chain industry. Before you sign on, the station will say, “We provide you with accommodation.” In practice, they take you to a landlord, you sign a rental agreement, and the rent is deducted straight from your wages. You never pay these things out of pocket, but they come off the top of your pay.
So it is not zero-cost at all. It means you take on debt before you start, and there is no way out. To get out, you have to “redeem” yourself.
●A morning briefing at a delivery station, held on the pavement. Personnel management, order coordination and everything else the platform requires all depend on these grassroots stations. Shot by: TianleDuring our interviews, many station managers were equally exasperated, because they are under pressure from the platform’s performance appraisal. The platform entrusts a station to a manager because that manager can supply a steady flow of fresh recruits. Beyond that, the platform washes its hands of everything. The platform has no employment relationship with the riders — the contracts are merely cooperation agreements, and they are signed electronically on a phone. That makes it very easy to slip through loopholes, because you are never going to read every word carefully. Yet it is precisely this contract that governs the rider’s future labour protection and accident claims. But most job-seekers have only one aim: to earn money first. Every other concern can be dealt with later. When it comes to this job, the majority of the delivery riders I interviewed either regard it as a transitional phase in life, or they are working to accumulate, as quickly as possible, a lump sum they can call their own.
Here is a line of dialogue I wrote for Wei Li in the film:
“This is a part-time job, nothing more. Do you know how many registered riders there are in this country? If we paid social insurance and housing fund contributions for every single one of them, would the company still be in business? They are doing this of their own free will — they earn per delivery, and if they do not run an order, they can simply rest. They do not have to face the daily reports, the weekly reports, the year-end performance appraisal and all the rest of that pressure.” All of these are the price of part-time work: you have no connection whatsoever to the platform. The cooperation agreement is signed with nothing but a third-party labour-services company. Does anyone really understand what a cooperation agreement means? It means no social insurance, no housing fund, no protection. Some of the clauses, in the riders’ own words, amount to nothing less than draconian terms. Because all the bargaining power sits in the hands of the contracting party. There are details at play here. Everyone knows riders pay three yuan a day in insurance, but that only covers damage caused to others through the rider’s own fault. If the fault lies with the other party, it is their insurance that must compensate. But there is a third scenario, and if the rider’s own negligence causes injury to the rider, it is a dead end — the rider receives no compensation at all. That is the situation depicted in the film.
II. Everyone Is Trapped in the Algorithm
In truth, the delivery rider and the algorithm engineer at the internet platform are merely the film’s point of entry. Rather than saying the film is about delivery riders trapped in an algorithm, it is more accurate to say that all of us are trapped in the algorithm. Besides the rider being struck by a car, there is a parallel thread in the film: the programmer is laid off. Both families live in a contemporary Chinese city, yet across the different strata, even when people brush past each other on the street, we do not even spare the other a glance. Why? Because the busyness of our own work drives us apart, breeding indifference, until in the end what remains is an unresolvable hostility.
You can imagine: without the traffic accident, this programmer would never in his life interact with a delivery rider. The system tells him he must not engage with them, must not let sympathy for them bleed into his work.
●In this scene, the programmer and the rider pass each other in a lift — a scenario any one of us might live through every day. Interestingly, in the finished film, every rider in a yellow uniform bears no Meituan branding or logo.An algorithm engineer’s purpose is to optimise the system — this is an activity charged with strong professional imperatives. His goal is not to study the plight of delivery riders and then design a mechanism to protect them. A competent algorithm engineer must follow the logic of the algorithm, maximise commercial profit, and at the same time avoid labour disputes. In the film, the programmer Wei Li’s pace of work is relentless, leaving no time to consider what anyone else might think. All that weighs on him are those few things: KPIs, performance appraisal, the prospect of a promotion and a raise or a layoff. He does not stop to ask whether the algorithm might hurt other people to some degree, or to a greater degree. He must believe wholeheartedly in the work he does, because the environment demands that he believe, or he is out on his ear.
Only at the instant he knocks down the rider does a flicker of doubt cross his mind. But it is not yet aimed at the algorithm; it is simply a moment of moral awakening surfacing in his humanity — I hit this person, surely I owe some responsibility.
That process of awakening is slow. If an algorithm engineer were to truly place himself in opposition to his employer, I do not think that would be realistic. A college friend puts a piercing question to him: “At our age, what other problem do we have besides money?” Under that premise, the fact that he ultimately refuses the company’s lucrative counter-offer to come back already marks his moral high point, because he has come to understand that some things cannot be weighed in money or material terms. So when faced with the company’s offer, he says:
“A person is not an orange. You cannot squeeze the juice out and toss the peel aside and think that is the end of it.”In the end, Jin Peng’s wife — the delivery rider — chooses to stop treatment, but the representing lawyer decides to redirect the focus of the lawsuit from the programmer to the platform. This is, in truth, a tragedy, yet it prompts two people from different strata to awaken, almost unconsciously.
III. Where Lies the Value of Work
There is an old man in the film who worked as a film projectionist when he was young. He tells Wei Li about the days when he travelled to the countryside to screen films for villagers, when tickets were impossible to come by. Later he lived through market reform and was made redundant in the 1990s. This old man could be any worker who lived through that era. What he is telling Wei Li is: the redundancies you experienced, I experienced too. And the work I devoted myself to in my youth filled me with pride, because I was serving the people, and every single thing I did had value and meaning.
And now? Today, every value we create is measured by profit. Yet in the film, the delivery rider who generated all that profit is lying in the ICU, and no one comes to look after him. There is a dialogue between Wei Li and the rider’s lawyer:
“We built this software. How much convenience has it brought to people? When you work, do you not order takeaways? How many hours has it saved you? That is its worth. We have even introduced a brand-new way of living. You cannot deny that.” “I do not deny that you have created value. But have you stopped to consider that the people who truly create value are now lying in the ICU?”
Wei Li says, food delivery saves you time — that is its value. But where does all the time saved by food delivery actually go? You will find that there is never enough. Everyone longs, outside of work, for a moment of leisure, to travel happily with family and friends, to do things that matter. Yet most of our hours are swallowed up by work or by commuting, and we can only stitch together our real lives in the scraps of time that are left.
What are we all rushing about for every single day? Compared with the past, we have smartphones, we have cars — so why is the spirit so exhausted? What is the cost behind it all? This, too, is what I want to tell audiences through the film.
●Some behind-the-scenes stills. The film uses many shots to capture Hangzhou as it really was in 2022. Director Liu Taifeng also mentioned in our interview that sitting at the roadside, watching and recording the various ordinary people who pass by, was one of his key ways of gathering creative material.
IV. The Situation Keeps Getting More “Involuted”
It has been two years since we filmed the movie, and far from improving, the food delivery industry has only got worse. More and more people are entering the trade, the per-order rate for riders keeps falling, and reportedly the three-yuan daily insurance has been cut to two yuan fifty. The other day, while we were on a roadshow in Shanghai, we popped into a restaurant for soup dumplings. This place has an exceptionally high rating on the platform. When we arrived, the manager told us that all we needed to do was check in, write a positive review, and each of us could collect a complimentary side dish worth over ten yuan. A few of us checked in, and before long a whole table of side dishes arrived. The manager sighed, “What can you do? Everyone on this street operates the same way. If you don’t pad your reviews, the ratings drop and the platform stops promoting you.” But when we tasted the actual main dishes, they were nothing special, despite the glowing reputation online.
It is a vicious cycle, and the dine-in experience keeps getting worse. But I don’t blame the restaurants. They, too, are trapped in the algorithm. If they don’t play the game, they can’t make money. Many restaurant owners will tell you: doing food delivery means losing money on every single order, but it’s only to maintain the customer base. If you stop, you simply vanish from the platform.
● The restaurant industry under the platform economy: data from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics show that in the first half of 2024, the total profit of above-designated-size restaurants (those with annual revenue exceeding 10 million yuan) in Beijing was a mere 180 million yuan, down 88.8% year on year, with profit margins as low as 0.37%. Over the same period, Meituan’s local commerce business generated revenue of 60.7 billion yuan and an operating profit of 15.234 billion yuan, with an operating profit margin of 25.1%. Shot by: Tianle
The film industry is the same way. The benchmark by which a film or a television series is judged is also data-driven. This control extends to the finest detail — every plot beat, every scene, every character, even the casting — on the belief that if you design it all according to big data, audiences will surely swallow it. But where does the data and the traffic come from? You just find ways to “give away free side dishes”, don’t you? This is a universal phenomenon across every industry; it is simply most visible in food delivery.
In the old days, a restaurant could hire its own delivery staff and simply charge a bit more per order to get a meal to your door. A cinema served the neighbourhoods around it; people would come out at weekends to see a film, with the ticket prices posted openly on the marquee. Restaurants and cinemas were not struggling the way they do now, and the ecosystem around them was healthy.
What the platforms have done is consolidate all those resources into a single system. In truth, platforms do not merely profit from the businesses they operate. What they care about far more is a polished report, a chart of growing numbers. With those in hand, the capital behind them and the operations on the stock market generate dividends. I think that is the fundamental logic. Everything else — manual labour, intellectual labour, the value anyone contributes — simply does not matter as much. But now, the party optimising the algorithm’s efficiency and the party executing it are both chained together to one enormous chariot, hurtling relentlessly toward profit.
A few years ago, when an order took forty minutes to arrive, we did not think it was slow. Now, if it takes longer than twenty minutes, we complain. That is how a person’s psychology shifts. But it is not necessarily something we bring upon ourselves. Many consumers can be patient — you think, I know the meal comes in forty minutes, I will simply time it and order in advance. So why does this restlessness persist? In reality, some powerful force is gradually reshaping the way we think and the way we live. You might say these are simply our consumer habits now, but there are problems lurking behind those habits.
I have met a great many DiDi drivers and food delivery riders. Their frustration comes from unreasonable systems. Those systems need a great deal of humane reform, not simply because riders and drivers work for the platforms, but because they must reclaim the dignity they are owed as human beings.
As a film, Another Day Full of Hope can hardly change anything or mount a fierce indictment. Behind all this lies a systemic problem. I have simply distilled from everyday life the predicaments each of us faces, placed them on the screen, and written a great big question mark.
● Director Liu Taifeng at work on set.
Unless otherwise stated, all images are provided by the production team of Another Day Full of Hope
Liu Taifeng
