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Before you can fly, you have to be free.
2009 · 1h 57m · PG
Drama, Romance
Directed by
Bruce Beresford
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At the age of 11, Li was plucked from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange to Texas, he falls in love with an American woman. Two years later, he managed to defect and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet.
Top critics, in their words
Bruce Beresford's biopic of Li Cunxin, the Chinese ballet dancer who defected while on a student visa in Houston in 1981, is sometimes the movie equivalent of Oscar Meyer cold cuts. But the dancing is pure caviar.
Feel-good movie about a Chinese dancer presses all the right buttons.
Australian director Bruce Beresford handles the culture-clash aspects of the story with a surprising lack of subtlety.
Lovely and astounding, Mao's Last Dancer is a modern epic of art and ambition triumphing oppression.
Too often, though, the film plods along on the ground.
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