On a 1980s evening, the topmost clown-actor of the 20th century Sichuan opera, Qiu Fu passes away in an accident and half-unwillingly sets off for the Ghost City under the escort of two underworld officials. Along the way, he meets old friends. As they recall the past, a history of the living is conjured up.

A New Old Play

Tao and Dong promised each other they’d return to the village where the latter grew up, in Inner Mongolia, before following his family, who left to find better fortune in a large city in Southern China. This voyage is a mere pretext meant to reconnect the two childhood friends, who were separated for ten years. With a rare sensitivity, Tao Gu films this companion, who was lost not only “from view”, approaching him stealthily to capture all of his tragic intensity, his disillusioned generosity. Dong has remained a dreamer besotted with rock, an incensed body struggling to find money (he comes up with a jade business which does not work out), love, sex and, above all, to live following his own conceptions of liberty, under the ambiguous gaze of his parents and his “successful” brother.