Xiu Xiu - The Sent Down Girl

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 measures have long since become unclear and redundant. Xiu Xiu’s task is to look after a herd of horses for six months and then lead a mounted women's battalion; what the authorities 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.