It’s 1975 and the Great Cultural Revolution is in its final throes. Xiu Xiu, the daughter of a tailor, is “sent down” to the countryside to serve a movement that has long since lost its purpose. She is among the last of seven and a half million “Intellectual Youth” to be exiled from family, classmates, and everything that is familiar. Lao Jin, Xiu Xiu’s “instructor”, is a simple Tibetan herder, closer to the horses he keeps than either Chinese or Tibetan society – two worlds from which he is equally outcast…