Film poster for Mao's Last Dancer.
HONG KONG—A movie portraying the life of a top Chinese ballet dancer who defected to the West at the height of his career, sparking a diplomatic incident, opened Aug. 20 in the United States.
Mao's Last Dancer portrays the rags-to-riches story of Li Cunxin spanning two decades and three continents.
"The movie spans a time starting in the 1970s when Mao Zedong was still around, and ending in the 1990s," said Li, who lauded the film as an accurate filming of his book and a close-to-reality picture of his life story.
"This is a movie about how China evolved," said Li, who was admitted to Madame Mao's Beijing Dance Academy at age 11 in 1972.
"Even though I was only five or six when the Cultural Revolution ended, I think it had an extremely large impact on the years that came after."
Li said Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who had grasped tight political control of cultural output around the country, had a huge influence on the academic life of the institute.
"Her notion was to turn us ballet dancers into Red Guards," Li recalled.
"So even though I attended the Beijing Dance Academy in order to learn ballet, I still spent a huge amount of time studying communism and political studies."
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