USA,
1985, 102 min
Shown in 1986
CREDITS
- dir
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Peter Wang
- prod
-
Shirley Sun, Yangchian Wu, Youjun Zhu
- scr
-
Peter Wang, Shirley Sun
- cam
-
Peter Stein, Robert Primes
- cast
-
Peter Wang, Sharon Iwai, Kelvin Han Lee
- source
-
Orion Classics, 711 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10022, USA, FAX: 212-486-0648.
-
COMMENTS
Closing Night film, along with Absolute Beginners. Peter Wang in person.
OTHER
The title takes its lead from Richard Nixon’s famous one-liner on his first visit to China’s most familiar landmark, “The Great Wall is a great wall.” This is a clue to the wit and wry humor of this charming and utterly disarming first feature by Chinese American director Peter Wang. Essentially a coproduction between Chinese and American filmmakers, A Great Wall observes the reunion of a Chinese American family from San Francisco with their relatives in Beijing after a 30-year separation. Sharply noting the comical aspects of cross-generational as well as cross-cultural conflicts, this charming film is especially revealing in it sequences dealing with the interplay of Chinese youths enamored with Western culture and Americans looking for the traditional China. Well-paced and well-photographed, A Great Wall is more than a comedy in its observations on eternal human concerns.
–Telluride Festival
FACTOID #65
The combined running time for all the films in the Festival is approximately 310,000 minutes. Or to put it another way, 5,167 hours. That’s about 215 days of viewing, 24 hours a day, with no breaks.
