Prequel to ultimate performance

There may never again be a time when the world so eagerly awaits a single date. And ever since China was awarded the Olympic games seven years ago, the crew of Dream Weavers 2008 has been documenting this anticipation.

It is a film of many layers; five different stories chronologically linked from Tian'anmen Square to the construction of the Bird's Nest, to broken down villages, to the rising shoulders of Liu Xiang, the Olympic hurdler who personifies the dreams of a nation as he understatedly comes to terms with his own and his trainer's expectations.

But the most compelling story is much closer to the ground, and follows a less documented generation. Not the 1980s generation, product of the single child policy and immediate future of the country, or the generation before, represented by one character who must modernize and move from her village to make way for the Bird's Nest, but a new generation - a group of young gymnasts who spend more time preparing for the Olympics with their trainers and mentors than they do with their family - and a child born at the start of the film who is 7 years old at its end, whose process of growth captures the progress made in that time. The director thus skillfully depicts the Olympic dream.