A great documentarist makes his first foray into narrative feature filmmaking with this stark and ferocious look at survival under appalling conditions. China, October 1960. At the Jiabiangou labour camp in the Gobi desert, condemned rightists are sent for rehabilitation. Their task: digging a seemingly endless ditch between nowhere and nowhere. Their food supply dwindles to nothing, as a woman comes searching for her husband, one of the labourers. Cinematography by Lu Sheng, whose directorial debut, Here, There, is also screening at EIFF. The filmmaker will be in attendance and will also discuss his work in depth in a masterclass.

An elderly woman walks along a snowy street to her apartment. She makes herself comfortable in her armchair and speaks to the camera. Her name is He Fengming. As night slowly falls, she tells her life story, which spans the history of the Cultural Revolution. Once idealistic young journalists, Fengming and her husband were denounced as counterrevolutionaries, separated, and thrust into labour camps. A moving testament to human endurance, an extraordinary piece of oral history and a landmark in recent documentary cinema. The filmmaker will be in attendance and will also discuss his work in depth in a masterclass.