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March 06, 2004
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam
Director Ann Marie Fleming
Screenings: 3/4/04 7:15pm and 3/6/04 12:45pm at Camera 3
This film is not showing again at Cinequest but will be running at the Asian American Film Festival in San Francisco. GO SEE IT!
Long Tack Sam was a consummate performer, a vaudiville performer and magician who travelled the world during dangerous times and led a truly magical life. His great-granddaughter has done a great deal of research and followed his tracks around the world and back to find out about him. She's had to, because although he was once famous in China, Australia, America, and everywhere in between the fact that he never went into movies has essentially doomed him to obscurity outside the magician community.
Fleming has created a delightful historical film full of wonder. Cartoon sequences and animated photographs bring a circus-like magic to the movie, illustrating this showman's life in a most appropriate manner.
Long Tack Sam broke boundaries and crossed borders wherever he went, mixing Asian and Western magic in his show, marrying an Austrian woman in a time when intermarriage was most unusual, and refusing to be hemmed in by xenophobia and successfully dodging both world wars. His really was a magical life, and Fleming's comment that "memory is a lot like magic" rings true in this amazing homage.
Posted by Ealasaid at March 6, 2004 03:27 PM
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