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Mood:
- TouchingUpliftingEmotionalStylizedCaptivating
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Plot:
- Dancer's LifeFollow Your DreamRise To the TopHuman SpiritAgainst the OddsAmbitionArtists and ShowbizHopes more...
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Genres:
- DramaPeriod
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Time/Period:
- 20th Century60s70s
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Place:
- AsiaChinaTexasUSADance School
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Audience:
- Girls' Night
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Praise:
- Award Winner
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Based on:
- Based on BookBiographyBased on True Story
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Attitudes:
- SeriousRealistic
Does this gene fit Mao's Last Dancer?
Mao's Last Dancer, 2009
English, Mandarin
Australia
Profile of Mao's Last Dancer
Mao's Last Dancer can be described as uplifting, touching, and emotional. The plot revolves around dancers, a rise to the top, and going against the odds. The main genres are drama and period. In approach, Mao's Last Dancer is serious and realistic. It is set, at least in part, at a dance school. It is located in China and Texas. Mao's Last Dancer takes place in the 1960s. It is drawn from a biography, originally a true story, and based on a book. The movie has received attention for being an award winner. Mao's Last Dancer is well suited for a girls' night.
Summary of Mao's Last Dancer
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 labourers, but when recruiters from Madame Mao's ballet academy in Beijing swept through his single-room school in search of untapped talent to mould 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, 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.Practising 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 (played by Canada's 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. 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.
Details
| Language: | English, Mandarin |
| Country: | Australia |
| Release date: | 4 November 2009 |
| Runtime: | 117 min |
Cast and Crew
as Ben Stevenson
as Charles Foster
as Elizabeth Mackey
as Niang
Photos
Clips
Users Reviews
- 21.August.2010
- |
- by: dddrak
- dddrak rated this movie
8/10Great
- 21.August.2010
- |
- by: ccaprica
- ccaprica rated this movie6/10Okay
