The Shoeshiner's Journey

If someday on a noisy city street or a dusty road of a remote village in China, a battered van wrapped in slogans and red flags bumps into your eyes and high pitched songs of the 1960s explode in your ears, you should not think you are back to the 1960s. It's Liu coming.Liu used to hold a good position in the local government in Tibet. However, he quit his job and left his family twelve 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 behavior makes him politically provocative in a regime that advocates collectivism.The shooting of the film started in 2007 and has lasted for seven years. The story unfolds as the protagonist's journey goes on, both back to his traumatic past rooted in the Maoist era and forward to the obscure future of capitalist China. To a certain extent, 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.