Rating: 
Summary: Intense
Review: Reminded me of Zheng Yi Mou's To Live. Show's the corruption and abuse of some Communist party members during the Cultural Revolution through the exploitation of a naive girl.Highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
Review: Set in or after the Red China's Cultural Revolution of the 1960's and 70's, Xiu Xiu, The Sent Down Girl, relates the story of the title characters forced phyisical relocation from cosmopolitan Shanghai to the rural steppes of western China for "re-education." Sent and charged by local communist cadre leaders to a solitary post to learn about horses with only the company of a kind hearted herdsman, Xiu Xiu becomes emotionally and psychologicially overwhelmed by her geographic isolation to the point that she subsequently seeks escape at any and inevitably tragic cost. A truly heart wrenching film about the casual and indifferent destruction of youthful innocence, this is, bar none, the most melancholy film I've ever watched. Ethereal, tragic, beautifully filmed, and horrifically nihilistic, it's an eloquent and lyrical poem imbued with the murderous brutality of George Orwells 1984.
Rating: 
Summary: shocking
Review: The music is beautiful, as well as the scenery... but I can never watch this film again. I'm glad I saw it however. One of the main jobs of art is to "distribute the suffering"(-?) This film does this very well. Get ready to feel the intense pain of a beautiful young girl under an unfeeling and corrupt system.
Rating: 
Summary: Painfully sad to watch
Review: The two stars go to the director and the actors. It's odd because you know you've just seen a well-acted, well told story but at the same time, it left you with a chasm, a kind of sadness that is inconsolable. And I am afraid there is no entertainment value in this. It is specially sad when you see the lead actress' face. She doesn't look a day over twelve, and I know she's older biologically because of the explicit nudity but still how sad that she indures all these horrors and yet she remained innocent to the end. The poor little girl just wanted to go home to the love and comfort of her family. It doesn't get any better with the Tibetan horseman who tried to be her protector. He is treated as badly by the chinese men and was as impotent about his role as big brother, father, admirer to this poor little girl. How sad, this movie was. The DVD itself is not very good because it didn't have any extras at all. It would have been really helpful if there was a commentary by the director and perhaps a background on how the movie was made. It leaves one even saddier and emptier.
Rating:
Summary: Painfully sad to watch
Review: The two stars go to the director and the actors. It's odd because you know you've just seen a well-acted, well told story but at the same time, it left you with a chasm, a kind of sadness that is inconsolable. And I am afraid there is no entertainment value in this. It is specially sad when you see the lead actress' face. She doesn't look a day over twelve, and I know she's older biologically because of the explicit nudity but still how sad that she indures all these horrors and yet she remained innocent to the end. The poor little girl just wanted to go home to the love and comfort of her family. It doesn't get any better with the Tibetan horseman who tried to be her protector. He is treated as badly by the chinese men and was as impotent about his role as big brother, father, admirer to this poor little girl. How sad, this movie was. The DVD itself is not very good because it didn't have any extras at all. It would have been really helpful if there was a commentary by the director and perhaps a background on how the movie was made. It leaves one even saddier and emptier.
Rating:
Summary: Heartbreaking story
Review: This beautifully filmed and acted movie can be physically and emotionally uncomfortable to watch, but it tells a story that accurately portrays just one horrible outcome of the Cultural Revolution.
I recommend this movie for anyone interested in China.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant work
Review: This directing debut for Joan Chen surpassed all of my expectations. Yes, the movie leaves you with a horrible feeling, it can make you loose your sleep even. But how could one expect a sweet relieving ending for a great movie portraying the brutalities of the 70s in a red China? There was no justice and future for someone like Xiu Xiu in those days. And softening the ugly images of her life would do an injustice to the millions of broken and lost women who were unfortunate to be born in the Socialist countries, often deprived of the basic human rights. History's grimaces can be truly disturbing and shocking to the majority of Americans reared on a happy-end tradition of the Hollywood. And Chen's faithfulness to her material, as well as great acting by Lu Lu and Lopsang, make this low-budget movie so compellingly, yet painfully, realistic.
Rating:
Summary: A harsh indictment of Communism
Review: This film is a complex mix of interwoven metaphors. Even though the main character, a poor teenage girl, trades sex for freedom, this takes place within the context of a society where individual desire and freedom simply don't exist. The girl, in the communist sense, has corrupted herself, not by trading her body for favor, but by wanting to. She places her own desires above those of the People and is endlessly punished for it.
The film is a meditation on communist values, and how they have misled and betrayed its people. Everyone that the girl meets, except for her emasculated mentor, takes from her until, at the end, she simply has nothing left to give.
The film works in the context of a larger metaphor, I believe, one that deals with Tibet and its relationship to China. One can plainly see that China's presence there is harmful, that its values spread corruption even to the furthest reaches. The relationship between the herder and the girl can be seen as a metaphor for the relationship between China and Tibet. The herder's death is not merely a reaction to the loss of a loved one. It is a metaphor for the death of the soul of Tibet.
The Chinese government understood this film all too well as a harsh rhetorical criticism against its policies against women, Tibet, and people in general. That is why it was banned there.
Although this film is heart-wrenching and, at times, agonizing to watch, it depicts an all too real world where political philosophy sees individuality as criminal. If you ever want to feel good about living in a democratic society, check out this movie.
Rating:
Summary: Painfully True
Review: This film offers a realistic insight into one of the worst atrocities committed by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution in China... how he (in the name of promoting the homogeneity of communism throughout the land with no humane regard to the aftermath caused by his selfish greed, so to sustain his own cult of personality; thus adding perversion to his then already defunct theories of communism) single-handedly wrecked and annihilated both physical and emotional lives of millions of Chinese youths by disrupting their education and dispatching them to the remotest regions to reconcile with and learn from the rural peasants the 'way to a true Communist life'. This story tells of how a young and innocent girl , Xiu Xiu, was posted onto the said regime. Although she did apply for the posting herself, one must be aware that in those times, under the iron-grip propaganda of Mao, the Chinese population had basically no significant choices and were even discouraged to 'think & conceptualise' as that would be deemed as an insult to the 'perfection' of Mao's communist agenda. Back then, the poor Chinese people had to praise and be in alignment with Mao's theories with almost every breath of their controlled lives. Xiu Xiu's family had neither political connections nor money to deliver her from her fate. We see a youthful and energetic girl following the regime dutifully and patriotically for a year until she was sent off to live with a mentor from whom she was suppose to learn the ropes of horse herding. Upon later discovery that she might be able to return home as certain governing structure had been dissolved, Xiu Xiu then pinned all hopes to that possibility. The soul of Xiu Xiu deteriorates in front of the audience as she compromised her own body to despicable 'officials' who offered her the passage home. Contemplating that without their 'assistance', she would not only be stuck in the wilderness but also unable to get the formal documentation required to be a legitimate citizen at home, she gave in even to the most obvious of liars. The finale sequence demonatrates an amalgamation of true love and emotional torment that is rare to both our current time and developed societies. The actual fate of millions might had been worse than this representative portrayal. The story is not only an extremely touching epic, but also one of the most important films to have emerged from the Chinese cinematographic history.
Rating:
Summary: Poignant
Review: This is a story of the abused and abusers of the system in Communist China. Idealistic kids were sent down to the countryside by Mao to learn to appreciate peasants who neither needed nor wanted them there. Telling any more would give away the tear-jerker moments. Suffice to say, you will get angry, you will cry, and you will better understand some of the tumult that was China after the Cultural Revolution.
| 
