It’s 1975 and a nameless fugitive (Zhang Yi) has just escaped from a labour camp in the middle of a desert in Northwestern China. He wanders into the first village he can find, desperate to catch a screening of the 1964 propaganda film, “Heroic Sons and Daughters”, believing it might contain footage of his long-estranged teenage daughter.

But he’s too late: that night’s screening is over and the travelling projectionist (Fan Wei) is already loading up the reels en route to his next destination. Unfortunately for him, the fugitive isn’t the only one after the film: an impoverished orphan girl named Liu (Liu Haocun) wants the celluloid for a lamp she’s making for her bedridden brother.

What follows is an enduring, universal fable about the transformative power of cinema as the three jostle for possession of one precious reel, in a return to the classic, grand storytelling of director Zhang Yimou’s (Hero, Cliff Walkers) early films.