Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl
(Tian yu)

The scene is China in 1975 during the final stages of the Cultural Revolution. Xiu Xiu, the daughter of a tailor living in Chengdu, is sent to the countryside as part of the “People’s Education” programme. She is one of the last of roughly seven-and-a-half million “young intellectuals” who have served the revolution in this way; however, the purpose of these mesures have long since become unclear and redundant. Her task is to look after a herd of horses for six months and then lead a mounted women’s battalion ; what the autorities have neglected to tell her is that these battalions were dissolved long ago and that nobody will be sent to fetch her from this desolate location. Xiu’s “trainer” is a simple Tibetan herdsman by the name of Lao Yin ; he is an outcast fro whom hangling horses comes easier than getting along with his Chinese and Tibetan neighbours.