Platform

Cui Minliang (Wang Hongwei) and Yin Ruijuan (Zhao Tao) want out of Fenyang, a small city in Shanxi, and the stage is the only way they can see to do it. Jia Zhangke follows them and the rest of their theater troupe from the end of the 1970s into the early 1990s, as the state-run company is remade around them. Between Minliang and Ruijuan there is a long, unspoken wait, and neither one will say it first.