Mao's Last Dancer featured at 33rd Asian American International Film Festival

Bruce Beresford's Mao's Last Dancer to Screen
at 33rd Asian American International Film Festival

NEW YORK (June 28, 2010) -- Oscar-nominated Australian director Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy, 1989) will showcase his most recent feature Mao's Last Dancer at the 33rd Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF10) in New York City. The AAIFF10 is the longest running festival dedicated to showcasing the latest works created by filmmakers of Asian descent in addition to films that explore new constructs of Asian and Asian-American cinema.

Mao's Last Dancer, based on the biography of dancer Cunxin Li, recounts Li's remarkable journey from China to America. The film opens with Li's humble beginnings growing up in a rural, poverty-stricken village in China. At the age of eleven, Li is recruited by Madam Mao's men to attend the Beijing Dance Academy. Away from his family, Li struggles to master the foreign techniques of ballet. Despite the genre's western roots, the Beijing Dance Academy appropriates the balletic style to suit the Cultural Revolution's communist propaganda. Li goes on to become one of the school's top dancers.

Beresford astutely explores the political and cultural tension that arises when Li, after travelling to America through a cultural exchange program in 1979, decides to extend his stay indefinitely. Mao's Last Dancer tells the story of how one individual's passion for individual and artistic freedom transcends even the most stringent political ideology and restrictions. Mao's Last Dancer will screen at Chelsea Clearview Cinema on July 17, 2010.