Director: Geng Haiyang

Synopsis

More than ten years ago, I began following the problem of further education for migrant children at schools for the children of migrant workers. Because of the household registration system, they cannot take the college entrance exam in first-tier cities, so most of them leave these cities during primary or junior high school and return to their hometowns, which turns them from migrant children into left-behind children. The film follows Yan Tingbin, a boy who grew up in Beijing. Although he is younger and smaller than his classmates, his views on society and his experience of life are remarkably mature. At the crossroads of the senior high school entrance exam in his final year of junior high, he talks with his classmates about reality and ideals, revealing both his sense of fate and helplessness in the face of reality and his ideals and hopes...