Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl

Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl takes place in 1975, during China's Cultural Revolution, when large numbers of young people were sent from the cities to rural areas for manual labor. A teenage girl, Wen Xiu, is among those relocated, and she is assigned to a remote part of the Sichuan steppes. After about a year, she accepts the chance to move to an even more isolated spot with Lao Jin, a Tibetan horseman, to learn horse herding. Cut off from her family and the life she knew, she hopes to find a way back to the city, and that hope shapes the choices she makes in a place with few of them.

The film is the first feature directed by Joan Chen, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Yan Geling and served as a producer. It came before her second film, Autumn in New York, released in 2000. Li Xiaolu plays Wen Xiu and Lopsang plays Lao Jin, with Zheng Qian, Lü Yue, Gao Jie and Li Zhizhi in supporting roles among a credited cast of thirty. The story draws on Yan Geling's writing about the sent-down generation.

Made in Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan and the United States, the drama runs 99 minutes. It holds a critics' rating of 8/10 from 24 reviews, and audiences rate it 7.5/10 on IMDb from roughly 3,900 votes and 7.2/10 on TMDB from 51 votes, a pattern in which critical approval runs somewhat higher than the audience scores.