Aunt' Lam is in the church choir in one of the many small villages on the plains of China. She is rehearsing for a wedding. Her husband is lying in hospital with pneumosilicosis, the most common occupational disease in China, caused by breathing brick-dust. An oxygen supply keeps him alive. Their child, the nine-year-old girl Sheng-yue, has to leave school because she can't afford tuition fees. That is the way life is, without any prospect of improvement. Interwoven with this we see how Chen Shun-jun builds a house on the spot where he hopes the railway will be built. Raised from Dust presents Aunt Lam's problems, as common as insolvable, not as a great existential struggle, but with biblical minimalism, as it were. In the words of the maker: 'like the River Nu Jiang in southwest China - tranquil on the surface, but churning underneath'.