China in the mid-1960s was as sealed off from the outside world as North Korea is today, yet a small number of Western foreigners, diplomats, students, and true believers, were living inside the country when the Cultural Revolution erupted in the summer of 1966. This film follows their accounts of watching Red Guards mobilize, denunciation rallies spread, and daily life turn unpredictable and dangerous, using archival footage and firsthand testimony from people who were actually there. It also tracks the mirror image of that story in Western Europe, where young leftist activists idolized Mao as a model for utopian revolution, largely ignorant of what was happening on the ground. As China began opening up in the early 1970s, many of those foreign admirers and former residents had to reconcile their image of Maoist China with the reality that emerged. The film sits at the intersection of eyewitness history and ideological disillusionment, letting both threads run side by side.