MAO’S LAST DANCER DATE: FRIDAY, MAY 7 TIME: 7:00 PM VENUE: DWNTN BUY TICKETS

MAO’S LAST DANCER
(Australia, 2009) Dir.: Bruce Beresford
35 mm, 117 min., color, narrative, in English & Mandarin w/ E.S.

Brought to the screen by Bruce Beresford, director of such celebrated works as DRIVING MISS DAISY and BLACK ROBE, the inspiring true story of Li Cunxin speaks to personal and cultural freedom, passion and determination.

Born in 1961, Li lived with his six brothers and impoverished parents in China’s Shandong Province. His family was destined to be laborers, but when recruiters from Madame Mao’s ballet academy in Beijing swept through his single-room school in search of untapped talent to mold into the future leading lights of the Cultural Revolution, eleven-year-old Li was selected and committed to a strange new life of stringent training, both artistic and ideological. At first, the experience overwhelmed him, but when an audacious teacher introduced him to the works of great international performers (via concealed videotapes, no less), Li (excellently played as a young adult by dancer Chi Cao) realized dance’s true revolutionary potential.

Practicing by candlelight and jumping up stairs with sandbags tied to his ankles to build his strength while his peers slept, Li became the school’s top dancer. Discovered by Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood), the artistic director of the Houston Ballet and part of the first American cultural delegation to Communist China, Li in turn was one of the first exchange students allowed by Mao’s regime to go to America.

After a brief bout with culture shock – Houston’s malls and so-called Chinese restaurants were alien spheres to him – he quickly fell in love with America’s freedom and one of its winsome daughters (played by Amanda Schull, CENTER STAGE). When his exchange ended, Li refused to return to China, leading to a dramatic standoff at the consulate that made headlines across the United States.

MAO’S LAST DANCER features some of the most viscerally potent dance ever captured in a fiction film. It also reminds us of the sacrifice ideological defectors make, and of a not-so-distant time when artistic freedom was a human-rights issue – certainly relevant given recent international headlines about nations trying to control the flow of ideas and artists across their borders. Personal passions, it seems, can almost always trump the political if you are willing to go the distance to find your life.
- Michèle Maheux