Falun Gong practitioner Ding Yan becomes the film's guide through the opening months of the Chinese Communist Party's crackdown on the spiritual movement, which begins on July 20, 1999. The film follows her from the first arrests through two pivotal gatherings that follow: a Beijing news conference held by practitioners in October that draws international attention, and the Guangzhou Fa conference the following November. Ding Yan's own story anchors the account, tracking her through interrogation and torture at the hands of police until she dies in custody. The film treats her as representative of a much larger group of ordinary practitioners caught in the state's sudden reversal on a practice that had been tolerated for years. Produced with cooperation from Shen Zhou Film Studio, it stays close to the practitioners' own experience of the crackdown rather than offering an outside historical overview, using one woman's death to make the scale of the persecution concrete.