The world feels suffocating when you are young, due largely to discontent with your own soci or with older generations. Every society has its own problems, and every youth has his her own discontent to deal with. One Summer With You is set in a small village in China in the mid-19806 when China had just opened its doors to the world, giving rise to youngsters′ fervent desires to escape to other societies. Portraying the innocent first love between Sun Hongwei and Li Mingxin, director Dong Xie looks back on the Chinese generation in the 1980s that was filled with the longing for the outside world and, at the same time, questions the nature of love and morality. The film is apparently an innocent melodrama but also a poignant look at the psychology of Chinese society in the 80s. The characters in the film long to go to college in order to escape to the world outside their borders, which seems fairly different from now. The film also recalls the nostalgia for the humanist culture that faded away since the capitalist transformation. For Dong Xie, the 1980s is synonymous with the age of innocence′, which concludes with the tragic ending of love between Hongwei and Mingxin. Death has torn their love apart, and the age of innocence can never be revived. (Kim Ji-seok)