User Reviews

A senior on the street calls them "The Rock'N Roll Youth." These are a small band of disaffected young Beijing residents whom the director befriended and videotaped over a course of time, as they struggled with their addiction to drugs.We see them on the move, dodging the authorities when they can, and we learn from the conversation and from intertitles as several of them disappear on occasion into the state corrections system.We meet the poor, elderly mother of one of them, a girl who her friends try to get money for to wean her off her habit.The title, we learn at the end from another as he is in bed recuperating, comes from the idea that a delicate folded piece of paper can be made into something that will fly for a while, but that its inevitable fate is to come crashing to the ground.I found this a touching portrait of an aspect of modern Chinese life most of us do not know, and it benefited from the filmmaker being on the inside and not overplaying his hand.