A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
| A Thousand Years of Good Prayers | |
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U.S. DVD cover
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| Directed by | Wayne Wang |
| Produced by | Yukie Kito Rich Cowan Wayne Wang |
| Written by | Yiyun Li |
| Starring |
Faye Yu Henry O Vida Ghahremani Pasha D. Lychnikoff |
| Music by | Lesley Barber |
| Cinematography | Patrick Lindenmaier |
| Edited by | Deirdre Slevin |
| Distributed by | The Match Factory |
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Release date
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Running time
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83 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English, Mandarin, Persian |
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a 2007 drama feature film directed by Wayne Wang starring Faye Yu, Henry O, Vida Ghahremani and Pasha D. Lychnikoff, adapted from the short story by Yiyun Li and shot on a high-end high-definition video camera.
It was made as a companion piece to The Princess of Nebraska, a 2007 film also directed by Wayne Wang and adapted from Yiyun Li’s short story.
The film follows Mr. Shi (Henry O), a retired widower from Beijing. When his only daughter, Yilan (Faye Yu), who lives in Spokane, Washington and works as a librarian, gets divorced, he decides to visit her to help her heal. However Yilan is not interested. She tries keeping an emotional distance but when this finally fails she begins physically avoiding her father. He confronts her about an affair with a married Russian man (Pasha D. Lychnikoff) and she, in turn, lets loose about all the gossip she'd heard as a young girl about his alleged affair with a female colleague back in China.
Running parallel to this plot is Mr. Shi's park bench meetings with an elderly woman, Madam (Vida Ghahremani), who had fled to the United States from Iran after the revolution. Neither Mr. Shi nor Madam speak English well, but by gesturing and talking in their own tongues, they start a friendship which ends when Madam is put into a retirement home.
Mr. Shi and his daughter Yilan finally come to terms as father and daughter through the greater understanding achieved by their heated confrontations over perceived transgressions that neither one was initially willing to forgive.
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Wikipedia