THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA Special Screenings

Wayne Wang’s career as a filmmaker has been marked by a restless desire to adopt drastically different styles from film to film. EAT A BOWL OF TEA and JOY LUCK CLUB a re beautiful jewel-like pieces that handle melodramatic family stories with quiet precision. SMOKE and CHINESE BOX unfold in harsher more frenetic urban environments and have a documentary-style rawness.

THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA is Wang ‘s masterpiece in the latter mode. It follows a Mainland Chinese exchange student, a young girl, wandering in contemporary San Francisco as she decides whether or not to get an abortion.

The contemporary look and feel of this film was made to compliment the more stylistically straightforward, almost old-fashioned companion piece, A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS. The film depicts an entirely new generation of Chinese people who are already defined, for better and for worse, by having absorbed many aspects of Western culture.