Oakland, CA - Two recent films based on short stories by Yiyun Li, assistant professor of English at Mills College, will be featured in international film festivals this month and in October, 2007.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska will both be featured in the masters program at the Toronto International Festival. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers was directed by renowned filmmaker Wayne Wang, who told Variety (November 5, 2006), "… (I) was attracted by the story of a father coming from China to help his divorced daughter here in the U.S. where he ends up confronting more his own past instead…”

Wayne also directed The Princess of Nebraska, a companion piece to A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. It shares that film’s theme of Chinese citizens visiting the United States and finding it alienating and bewildering. According to the Toronto International Film Festival, “The Princess of Nebraska sees Wang, the master, enjoying the freedom to experiment with cinematic form after a decade-long stint making big-budget Hollywood films. A restless camera, shrinking and expanding frames, wild colour schemes and a daring use of light give the film an impressive sense of innovation and push digital video to its extremes.”

The San Sebastian Film Festival in Madrid, Spain, has also chosen A Thousand Years of Good Prayers for competition, while The Princess of Nebraska has been selected as a sidebar special.

The films were recently shown at the Telluride Film Festival and will also be shown at the Hawaii Film Festival in September and October, respectively.

In the months following its publication, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House 2005) received praise from every quarter, holding off major competition to win the Frank O'Connor International Award, the world's richest short story prize, taking home a PEN/Hemingway award and a California book award for first fiction. The Guardian honored it with the First Book Award and it also was short-listed for the Orange award for new writers and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim book prize. The San Francisco Chronicle included A Thousand Years of Good Prayers in their “Best Books of 2005” selections. According to Publishers Weekly, the book is “a beautifully executed debut collection of ten stories exploring the ravages of the Cultural Revolution on modern Chinese, both in China and America.”

Li grew up in Beijing, came to America to study medicine, and entered the Iowa Writers Workshop after earning her master’s degree in immunology from the University of Iowa. Earlier this year, she was chosen by Granta magazine as one of the best young American novelists.

Mills College is a nationally renowned, independent liberal arts college offering innovative degree programs to approximately 900 undergraduate women and 500 graduate women and men. Ranked one of the top colleges in the West by U.S. News & World Report and one of the Best 366 Colleges by The Princeton Review, Mills provides a dynamic liberal arts education fostering women's leadership, social responsibility, and creativity. Nestled in the foothills of Oakland, California, on 135 lush acres, Mills was recently selected by the New York Times as one of three outstanding California colleges for students to consider.

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