The film recounts a 30-year chapter of China’s mid-20th-century history through the story of Mr. ZHANG Xianchi and the interacting forms of theatrical fiction and documentary autobiography. Born into a Nationalist (KMT) family in the 1930s, ZHANG was a progressive young "leftist" and Communist Party supporter, then, after the founding of the New China in 1949, was dubbed a counter-revolutionary "rightist"––a public enemy–and jailed in 1957 for 23 years.
