Hearts and minds in the frame

San Sebastian

Film festivals are often about re-acquainting yourself with old friends, and this year's San Sebastian was no exception. One of the most cultured cinematic gatherings in Europe, hosted in the heart of Basque country on the northern coast of Spain, the 55th edition of the festival reunited author Paul Auster with director Wayne Wang.

Best known for their 1995 collaborations Smoke and Blue in the Face, the pair parted company acrimoniously over Wang's 2001 erotic flop The Centre of the World, which Auster had worked on.

Auster was head of this year's jury and presented his new film, The Inner Life of Martin Frost, out of competition. And Wang arrived at the festival with not one but two films based on short stories by Li Yiyun. One of these, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, played in competition, which Auster presided over. 'It's good and it's bad,' Wang said. 'I respect Paul a lot and I respect his sensibility. And I hope he can be objective about the films and not hold any grudges about our disagreement.'

However Auster feels, he cannot fail to see that Hong Kong-born Wang is back on blistering form after an extended - and disappointing - period making Hollywood movies (most recently the Queen Latifah vehicle The Last Holiday). Likewise Auster must have noticed the similarities to their own golden period. Although A Thousand Years of Good Prayers - which would eventually be awarded the Golden Shell award for best film - has the rigid formality of Smoke, his other film, The Princess of Nebraska (begun only in March after its companion had been finished) has the freewheeling, improvisational feel of Blue in the Face.

Wang has delivered two very different stories that set out to examine the Chinese immigrant experience in the US. Most impressive is A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, a heartbreaking tale of a Beijing man (Henry O, who would win the festival's best actor award) who travels to the US to visit his estranged daughter, who lives in an anonymous suburb in the Midwest. Feeling like Wang's take on the classic Yasujiro Ozu film, Tokyo Story, and etched with humour and sadness in equal measure, it was the film of the festival.

The Princess of Nebraska is the story of an 18-year-old Beijing girl (Ling Li) who travels to San Francisco from Omaha, where she's at college, to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. As an abortion tale, it's insubstantial - not least given that it played in the festival's Zabaltegi strand alongside Cristian Mungiu's harrowing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palme d'Or in Cannes this year. But as Wang shows the waif arguing with upper class Chinese-Americans - 'you're not even Chinese', she cries - the film offers some intriguing insights into how little the west really understands about China.