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. A Chinese widower visits his daughter in America.
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.
The film follows Mr. Shi (Henry O), a retired widower from Beijing. 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. However Yilan is not interested. She tries keeping an emotional distance but when this finally fails she begins physically avoiding her father. He confronts her about an affair with a married Russian man (Pasha Lychnikoff) and she, in turn, lets loose about all the gossip she'd heard as a young girl about his alleged affair with a female colleague back in China.
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
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