Man in Black is a portrait of 86-year-old Wang Xilin, one of China’s most important modern classical composers and now based in Germany. During the troubled time of the 1960s, he was the target of severe persecution, enduring beatings, imprisonment and torture. The film exhibits the body and soul of a man scarred by a life of suffering, a “man in black” who is yet still capable of deep and sincere compassion. He revisits some of the horrifying events that still live on in his memory as testimony to an era that saw the dehumanisation of the entire Chinese nation.