Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998)

Plot – Spoilers:
Set in ’70s China during the Down to the Countryside Movement – a government-mandated program that insisted that teenagers be moved from their urban families and sent to rural and mountainous regions to broaden their worldviews. The privileged and influential often found a way to beat this system, but Wen Xiu, the daughter of a simple tailor, being neither, willingly joins a busload of girls sent into the countryside. Even though she’s sad to leave her family and a friend who hadn’t had enough time to become her boyfriend, Xiu is buoyed by the enthusiasm and naivete of her age and mostly rose-tinted about the shift.

After a supervised stint with the other girls, Xiu is then sent alone to the hills with a horseman, Lao Jin, to learn the craft of herding horses. Lao Jin is nomadic and at ease with the horses and hills, but socially awkward. He also carries in silence the scar of having been castrated during a battle. Lao Jin instantly takes a protective liking for Xiu having once noticed her at a movie screening where she saucily took down someone trying to cop a feel in the dark.

What was initially meant to be a six-month internship with Lao Jin draws out, with no official coming to get Xiu. As her homesickness intensifies, Xiu forgets to value her time with Lao and instead focusses on doing anything that might get her an official ticket back home, the peak of her efforts being receiving an apple in exchange for her body.

The Wen Xiu-Lao Jin relationship is one of the most beautifully portrayed tragic ones you would see and is heightened by its deeply moving musical score.

Random Trivia:
The movie inspired the name of the band, Xiu Xiu.