Synopsis

If some day you are on a noisy city street or a dusty road in a remote village in China, and a battered van wrapped in slogans and red flags assaults your eyes while high pitched songs from the 1960s explode in your ears, you are not back to the 1960s: you have just come across Liu. Liu used to hold a good position in the local government in Tibet. However, he quit his job and left his family 12 years ago. He went on a long, non-stop journey, traveling around China. With a broken van as his only companion, Liu dedicates himself to the great aspiration of establishing a university of international communism on his own. The irony is that the individualistic heroism of his behaviour makes him politically provocative to a regime that advocates collectivism. The shooting of this film started in 2007 and has lasted for seven years. The story unfolds as the protagonist’s journey continues, both back to his traumatic past rooted in the Maoist era, and forward to the obscure future of capitalist China. Liu’s personal past and present are intimately intermingled with the past and present of this nation; their intersections constantly move forward like the spinning wheels of Liu’s van.