Five Chinese artists stand at the centre of the film: the modern dancer Wen Hui, the writer Ye Fu, the cartoonist Pi San and the visual artists Gao Brothers. They are part of a fragile yet courageous counterculture. Taking their own family stories as starting points, they explore the echoes of the past in order to understand the predicaments of the present. Increasingly, their struggle for a democratic civil society seems as relevant for the world today as it is for China.