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8 unusual facts about A Thousand Years of Good Prayers


A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a 2007 drama feature film directed by Wayne Wang starring Yu Feihong, Henry O, Vida Ghahremani and Pasha Lychnikoff, adapted from the short story by Yiyun Li and shot on a high-end high-definition video camera.

Chinese actress Yu Feihong (credited as Faye Yu) was the only actor in this film not based in America.

When his only daughter, Yilan (Yu Feihong), who lives in Spokane, Washington and works as a librarian, gets divorced, he decides to visit her to help her heal.

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.

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.

Wayne Wang chose to adapt A Thousand Years of Good Prayers into a film because it reminded him of all the Ozu films he so admired when he was a film student.

Yu Feihong

Faye Yu Feihong (俞飞鸿) (born 1971 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang) is a Chinese actress, film director and producer, best known in the west for appearing in Wayne Wang's award-winning American films A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2007) and The Joy Luck Club (1992).

Between 2005 and 2008 she only chose 1 acting project, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which briefly brought her back to the U.S. and reunited her with Wang.



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