A young Beijing woman is “sent down” to live among the Dai minority of Yunnan Province during the Cultural Revolution in this key work from one of China's few Fifth Generation female filmmakers. Prim and properly pant-suited, teenage Li Chun is relocated to the mist-ridden mountains of Yunnan to better forget her overly intellectual background, and is overwhelmed-and awakened- by the physical, primal, and deeply sensual world of the Dai, a minority group with roots in Laos and Burma. More than a classic of Fifth Generation filmmaking, Sacrificed Youth stands apart through its expression of a unique, powerful female point-of-view, and for its ethnographic commitment to documenting the Dai culture. At times dialogue is abandoned entirely, and the camera instead luxuriates in the beauty of the region's landscapes. “The film administers some hard knocks to Han Chinese notions of ‘superiority' over the various minority peoples,” wrote Tony Rayns during the film's first overseas screenings, “and implicitly attacks the ‘folksy' clichés of earlier films about the minorities.”