There is a refreshing kind of honesty to Sacrificed Youth, a portrait of a Dai village community that does not pretend to know its subject, but rather explores it through the eyes of a Han outsider. Li Chun is an educated city girl sent from Beijing to a village in southwest China during the years of the Cultural Revolution when urban youths were dispatched to the countryside to "learn from the people." Li Chun settles in with a kindly "uncle" and his toothless old mother, Ya. Sitting at her spinning wheel, Ya embodies every fairytale witch from Li Chun's childhood, but gradually she becomes the emblem of an unspoken love. Like a graceful ethnographic documentary, this fiction film peels back the stereotypes and "folksy" clichés about minorities to initiate us, along with Li Chun, into the complexities of collective living (and public rituals of sexual awakening; when Li Chun sheds her drab city clothes for a skirt, her life is transformed). At one moment all peaceful curiosity, at the next lost in a forest primeval, Li Chun is gradually seduced, and transformed, by her hosts; now she is a woman with two homes, which is the same as having none. With a minimum of dialogue and with lushly expressive visuals, the film powerfully transmits her internal experience. Only at the end does the camera pull back to reveal her for what she is: a lone figure, tiny against the ravages of time and nature. Zhang Nuanxin embodies the vivid spirit of the Chinese "New Wave" in this, her second film.