One of the very few feel-good Chinese art films I've watched. The story is set in 1971, in the China of the Red Brigades. Two university students, Luo (Kun Chen) and Ma (Ye Liu), were branded as "reactionary intellectuals," and banished to a remote mountain village called Phoenix in the Sky to undergo "re-education" by the local peasants. They work the mines and transport human fertilizers to the fields. Both men fall in love with the illiterate granddaughter of the local tailor, known only as the little seamstress (Xun Zhou). With her help, they steal a cache of subversive books from another student called Four-Eyes - novels of Honore de Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Kipling, etc. The guys spend their time reading the novels to the little seamstress, narrating stories to the community, and playing "Mozart is Thinking of Mao" on the violin. Through Balzac, the little seamstress aspires for a better life, so one day she leaves town. 
The boys intercept her, but she has already made up her mind. (And they know better than to argue with a woman.)Years later, Ma is an accomplished violinist, and Luo is a directory of the dental institute or something. Ma finds out that Phoenix in the Sky is one of the many villages that will go underwater once the construction of Three Gorges Dam starts. So Ma goes back to his place of re-education for one last visit. He hopes to find her during the Hungry Ghost celebration, but she doesn't show up. The men have a reunion, and talk about love found and lost.
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