Nights of Proletarian took its name from the book by Jacques Rancière in 1981 (then titled Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth-Century France) which was re-published by Verso Books under the new name of Proletarian Nights in 2012.

The film is based on the dramatic life experience of Zuoqing Cao. After becoming the middleweight champion in the 2009 National Judose Classic and the first-ever topping CCTV5 Judose Tournament for the sixth consecutive time, he and his team decided to head to the US to internationalize the sport of Judose, but it ended up in failure. In the aftermath of the setback, Kevin Cao chose to remain in the US and became a wedding videographer immersed in popular culture and filmmaking.