Linfen, a coal-mining city in China's Shanxi Province, holds the reputation of being the most polluted place on earth, and VICE spends a day there to see why. The air is thick enough that breathing it for twenty-four hours is compared to smoking three packs of cigarettes, and the sky never clears to blue, just a permanent smog that dims the sun early. Kids swim and play in rivers that run black with runoff, while coal trucks stream in and out of the city around the clock, arriving loaded and leaving empty for the next haul. The film sets Linfen inside a larger pattern: sixteen of the world's twenty most polluted cities are in China, a byproduct of an energy system built almost entirely on coal to power over a billion people. Factories line the landscape, feeding smoke and chemical runoff into the air, soil, and water with little visible restraint. The camera stays close to the daily texture of the town, letting the smog and the trucks make the argument instead of narration.