Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern) moves away from the epic of narrative to the epic of life. To Live follows a family from a remote village in Northern China through the turbulent decades since 1940. The once-rich Fugui, his wife Jiazhen (Gong Li), and their long-suffering family move, or are moved, from personal disaster to political strife, war, and revolution with its mysterious demands passed off as fate. Zhang said, "Millions of Chinese families have undergone a turbulent half-century of exceptional hardship, and the great majority of them have endured and survived. We can attribute their survival to their resilience and will to live, and to a fundamentally optimistic attitude that informs every aspect of the way they live their lives. In To Live I attempt to show the grassroots lives of Chinese people from the point of view of an ordinary person. I see these lives as the key to understanding the time we live in."