After Mao's death in 1976, a brief opening called the Beijing Spring let Chinese citizens speak openly for the first time in decades. A brick wall near Tiananmen Square became the Democracy Wall, plastered with posters demanding accountability for the Cultural Revolution's dead and imprisoned. A group of former factory workers, including the young Ai Weiwei, formed the art collective Stars and hung abstract paintings and sculptures on the wall as a rebuke to Maoist orthodoxy. Wei Jingsheng was sentenced to 15 years for calling Deng Xiaoping a dictator, and Stars members secretly taped his trial and posted the transcript, drawing coverage from the New York Times. Filmmaker Chi Xiaoning shot the movement on 16mm, and when police arrested him he destroyed blank reels instead of his real footage, which his family then hid for decades. The film uses that rescued archival material alongside present-day interviews to trace how Deng's government crushed the Wall and scattered its activists into prison or exile.