Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl

Joan Chen's first film, from 1998, is about one of the young people sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Xiu Xiu, fifteen, is sent to the Sichuan grasslands in 1975 to learn horse herding and is placed with a Tibetan herder named Lao Jin. She was told she would go home after six months, but the permission never comes and nobody attends to her. Looking for a way back to the city, she is abused in turn by men who say they will help her, while Lao Jin is the only one who does her no harm. The film presents the policy of sending youth down as an abandonment by the state, told through one girl. Permission to shoot was not granted, so it was made covertly, and the director had trouble as a result. Who it's for: viewers interested in recent Chinese history and hard drama. Who it's not for: anyone who would rather not approach scenes of sexual abuse; the film shows them repeatedly.