Escaping a dubious past, Liang Renwei and his pregnant girlfriend Pomegranate return to his home village. The couple plans to remain until the child is born, then see what opportunities arise. While he takes a job enforcing the One Child Policy quotas, she begins to see faceless ghosts of the past.

Set in a picturesque mountainous town in China, Shadow Days reveals the devastating effects of the one-child policy and the embedded violence within this cruel constraint. After directing documentaries on Chinese society, Zhao Dayong turned to fiction for this poignant and evocative social drama.