Prominent Chinese writers and scholars gather in a village in Shanxi, a province of China and the hometown of leading Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke (Ash is Purest White; A Touch of Sin). This starts an 18-chapter symphony about Chinese society since 1949. Narrated by three important novelists born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s respectively, telling their own stories with literature and reality, the film weaves a 70-year spiritual history of the Chinese people.

"By basic design it is understandably slighter than the baroque storytelling of something like A Touch of Sin or the far swinging panoramas of Ash Is Purest White and Mountains May Depart. It is, however, after similar things. The mass migration of Chinese people from farms to cities has provided the backdrop of much of Jia’s latest work; and through his interviews with Liang, Jia, and Hua (who were each born a decade apart)–as well as some on the nose dramatizations of their recollections–we are given an almost chronological look at the shifting memories of that time." The Film Stage

"Quiet, dignified and ruminative." Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter