General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Sacrifice of Youth (青春祭)

Sacrifice of Youth (青春祭, also released as Sacrificed Youth) is a 1985 Chinese drama film directed and co-written by Zhang Nuanxin (张暖忻), adapted from Zhang Manling's (张曼菱) novella There Is a Beautiful Place (有一个美丽的地方). It follows Li Chun, a Han Chinese sent-down youth (Urban youth sent to countryside for re-education during Cultural Revolution) who, during the Cultural Revolution, is sent to a Dai minority village in Yunnan and gradually awakens to beauty, culture, and her own identity.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title / English titles	青春祭; Sacrifice of Youth, Sacrificed Youth; alternate Chinese title 远乡³
Director and writers	Directed by Zhang Nuanxin; screenplay by Zhang Nuanxin and Zhang Manling, based on Zhang Manling's novella⁴
Production	Youth Film Studio of Beijing Film Academy (北京电影学院青年电影制片厂); released in China in 1985¹
Cast	Li Fengxu as Li Chun; Feng Yuanzheng as Ren Jia; Song Tao as the landlord elder; Guo Jianguo, Yu Shuai, Yu Tan in supporting roles⁴
Music	Liu Suola and Qu Xiaosong; nominated for Best Music at the 6th Golden Rooster Awards³
Running time and language	96 minutes, Mandarin³
Honors	Special jury prize at the 1986 Sète international film festival in France; named among the ten best Chinese-language films at the 6th Hong Kong film festival⁵
Douban rating	8.3 from about 7,008 user ratings³

Spoilers

Plot

During the Cultural Revolution, the 17-year-old student Li Chun is sent down to a Dai village in Yunnan province in China's southwest under the campaign that sent urban youths to the countryside for re-education. At first she is a misfit: she cannot do Dai farm work, her clothes are shabby, and the proud village beauty Yibo mocks her. The Dai villagers welcome her warmly, and the landlord family cares for her in detail.¹^•²

Awakening to beauty. Seeing the Dai girls in their colorful tube skirts while she wears the drab People's uniform that in the cities symbolized revolution, Li Chun feels the pull of beauty for the first time. Encouraged by the landlord elder, she cuts a tube skirt from a bed sheet, puts on earrings, and comes to live like a Dai girl, carrying water, swimming in the river, and working the fields.²^•⁵

At a market fair she meets Ren Jia, an educated sent-down youth in a neighboring village, and the two become close friends and confidants. Unlike Li Chun, who has settled into Dai life, Ren Jia longs to return to the city and urges her to study for the university entrance examination. At a harvest feast, the landlord family's eldest son, drunk, fights with Ren Jia, and Li Chun realizes he loves her; because she is not truly Dai, she cannot accept his love, and she leaves the village to teach at a mountain primary school.⁵^•⁶

The ending. After the landlord family's grandmother dies longing for her, Li Chun returns for the funeral. Years later she passes the examination and returns to the city for university. When she revisits the Dai region, she finds the village buried by a mudslide; Ren Jia and the villagers have died, her own traces of life there have vanished, and only silent stone mountains and desolate fields remain.¹^•⁷

Production and style

Zhang Nuanxin enrolled in the Directing Department of the Beijing Film Academy in 1958, graduated in 1962, and stayed on as a professor; the Cultural Revolution cost her cohort their filmmaking years, and they returned to the studios in the late 1970s as the "Fourth Generation" of Chinese directors, already middle-aged. Her films include The Drive to Win (1981), Sacrificed Youth, Good Morning, Beijing (1990), and A Yunnan Story.⁶^•⁸ She made Sacrificed Youth as her second major feature, after her debut The Drive to Win had won her a special Golden Rooster directing award.⁹^•⁴

The film is a landmark of the prose-poem aesthetic associated with the Fourth Generation. Contemporary critics called its style "poetic": from novel to script to finished film, plot was progressively thinned until what remained was detail and mood.⁷ The Rotterdam festival account credits its lasting freshness to Zhang's free, unmannered hand-held camera, location shooting, natural editing rhythms, and use of non-professional actors, and calls its naturalism shocking for the Chinese cinema of its time.¹⁰ Cinematography was by Mu Deyuan and Deng Wei, production design by Li Yongxin and Wang Yanjin, and the score by Liu Suola and Qu Xiaosong.⁴

The film's treatment of the sent-down youth (知青) experience is distinctive among Chinese films on the subject. It was an early Chinese film about sent-down youths, preceded by Xie Fei's Our Fields (1982); one account cites the scholar Zhang Yingjin's reading of it as the story of "a Han girl rediscovering true meanings of life".¹¹^•¹⁶ A Chinese-language review places it within the "scar" (伤痕) literature and film current: it contains no angry denunciation, yet remains wrapped in quiet sorrow and wordless protest, and among films of the rustication genre it is noted for its light, poetic touch.¹² The title change from the novella's There Is a Beautiful Place to Sacrifice of Youth marks the shift in emphasis: where the novel chiefly expresses the narrator's love for the Dai region, the film adds the grief of youth thrown away, which the healing beauty of the landscape cannot redeem.⁵

Reception and legacy

The film was well received on its 1985 release. It won a special jury prize at the 1986 Sète international film festival in France and was chosen among the ten best Chinese-language films at the 6th Hong Kong film festival; its score was nominated for Best Music at the 6th Golden Rooster Awards.⁵^•³ It was shown at the Museum of Modern Art's "People's Republic of China: The New Generation" series in New York in April 1987, alongside films by Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Huang Jianxin.¹³ Later revivals included the International Film Festival Rotterdam's "Rediscovering the 4th Generation" program in 2008¹⁰ and the Women's Power section of the 8th Beijing International Film Festival in 2018.¹

Retrospective criticism treats the film as a classic that combines ethnic minority subject matter with modern film language. The film scholar Wang Hui's survey of Chinese youth cinema places it among the Fourth Generation's "small stories in a great era", works in which the poetic treatment of youth gave way to details of social reality.⁷ A survey of Chinese film history lists it among the Fourth Generation's masterpieces that restored the realist tradition while building a prose-like aesthetic.¹⁴ On Douban it holds a rating of 8.3, with over 80 percent of users awarding it four or five stars.³

The title is also used for an unrelated work: a 45-episode television drama of the same name, filed with China's broadcasting regulator in October 2015 by Wenhui Jinchuan (Beijing) Culture Media, a revolutionary-war story about young anti-Japanese fighters.¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026