Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first Time when she is almost seven.
Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home..
In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain.
Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends.
Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea.
When she is born in 1973, her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains.
They are strangers to her.
Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first Time when she is almost seven
