About This Film
Festival Year: 1992
Run Time: 109 Minutes
Film Type: Feature
Animated: No
Countr(ies): China
English Subtitles: No
Captions: None
Film Overview
One of the most visually breathtaking Festival entries, this mythic speetacle depicts two blind wanderers in feudal China, an elderly troubadour and his young apprentice. Saint to some, madman to others, the master teaches single?minded devotion to music; he betieves that if he breaks 1,000 banjo strings during a lifetime of perfonnances, his sightlessness will be cured. The master is up to the 990s, but in a land of peril, temptation and civil war, will the old man live to reach his goal and will he like what he sees? This tragic epic of blind faith and eyes opened was stunningly filmed in Shaanxi Province.