Han Jie’s feature debut draws on his own experiences growing up in a desolate mining district in northern China’s Shanxi province. A Chinese road movie, Walking on the Wild Side charts a young gang’s continuous flights from one kind of trouble to the next. Mirroring the stark and barren landscape, the film relays the grim story of these delinquents’ dreams of liberty and easy money. Played by nonprofessional actors who are real life troublemakers, the film offers a realism that is at once oppressive, cruel, and sympathetic.

On November 8, 1937, Taiyuan fell and the army retreated south to Linfen. For a time, this Jinnan town became the center of the War of Resistance in Shanxi and even North China. At this time, a special formation unit of the Eighth Route Army, the Eighth Route Army Academy, was established in Liucun Town, Linfen. In more than one hundred days, more than six hundred bloody youths "cast into steel" in this anti-Japanese war furnace.