A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Mr Shi, a retired widower from Beijing, comes to Spokane in the United States to see his daughter Yilan after her divorce. They live in the same apartment and cannot talk. Sitting in the park he communicates more easily with an Iranian woman who speaks no English, in a language both of them half know. The film is not interested in immigration. It is interested in the weight a mother tongue carries: Yilan has learned silence in Chinese and expression in English, and the distance between father and daughter grows with the language. There is also something in his own past he has never told. The form is calm and small in scale: the apartment, the supermarket, the park. Scenes are long, dialogue sparse, and the silences deliberately left unfilled. The source is Yiyun Li's story, and she wrote the screenplay. Wayne Wang made this alongside The Princess of Nebraska, adapted from another of her stories, as a pair of companion films. It screened in Toronto in 2007 and competed at San Sebastián. Henry O plays the father, Faye Yu the daughter and Vida Ghahremani the woman in the park. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet family drama and stories across cultures. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for events. The film consists almost entirely of things not said, and even at eighty-three minutes some viewers will find it slow.