An espionage thriller set in the 1950s and adapted from the novel "Year Suan/Plot Against" by May Jia. Tony Leung Chiu Wai plays a blind man who works for a piano tuner. He is recruited for a spy mission because of his exceptional hearing.
Jesse Hallum sells the family farm to see that his daughter receives the medical care she needs at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital. The big city challenges him, though, especially when his illiteracy is exposed.
A functionally illiterate factory foreman (Dennis Weaver) loses his job after refusing a promotion that requires reading.
Newlywed Oliverio receives disturbing news that his mother is on her deathbed. He travels to a remote part of Mexico to fetch a lawyer who can sort out her will. Leaving his wife behind, he embarks on a bus ride that’s interrupted by an increasingly absurd series of episodes, including an impromptu birthday celebration; a one-legged man writhing in the mud; come-ons from an insatiable small-town belle, Raquel; and Oliverio’s frequent, Freudian nightmares.
Too often, if a child is illiterate at the end of third grade, they will fall behind forever. By nine years old, many children are already SENTENCED to the cycles of poverty, prison, and addiction that have devastated generations before them. Our story begins with a heartbreaking look at adults who never learned to read and ends with the children who still have a chance.
