China, a snowbound town at dusk, a woman slowly walks across the city to reach her modest apartment. Fengming sits down comfortably and begins to remember. Her memories bring us back to the very beginning, in 1959, and go through her life and the successive political movements that swept China.

Master documentarian Wang Bing, who presented a new 8-hour film in Cannes last month, once again unearths stories from his country’s Maoist past. Stripped bare to the essential–an elderly woman, sitting in her home, faces the camera and delves into her memories–it is all the more compelling.