The award-winning third feature by Ning Ying, China’s premiere woman director, is a subtly subversive portrayal of modern Beijing. Set within a desolate landscape of imposing skyscrapers amidst stretches of tenement housing, contemporary urban life emerges as a highly compromised series of negotiations between individuals attempting to embrace their own destinies and a state machine that manages to intervene in the most intimate affairs of daily life. Ning Ying’s gift is to gently capture this retail dispensing of ideology to the citizenry—from young policemen patrolling neighborhoods by bicycle to aged women who monitor the fertility of their female neighbors and parents who attempt to mold their children into "fitting" members of the society.