The new, improved Edinburgh International Film Festival is widely regarded as a festival of discovery, a place to seek out new talent in filmmaking. But in this year’s line up, two of the programme’s most rewarding finds come from a long established talent, albeit one who has been missing in action from the art house circuit for a few too many years.

Wayne Wang, perhaps best known for his unapologetic celebrations of the joy of tobacco, Smoke and Blue In The Face, has emerged from a profitable stint making crowd-pleasing star vehicles for the likes of Queen Latifah (Last Holiday) and Jennifer Lopez (Maid In Manhattan). With the low budget companion-piece projects A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers and The Princess Of Nebraska, both of which are based on short stories by Yiyun Li, Wang has returned not just to the observational, indie-accented character studies of Smoke but also to the subject that inspired his very first forays into cinema – China and Chinese culture.

Between them, Wang’s two latest films are perceptive portraits of three generations of Chinese society who are effectively strangers to each other. A Thousand Years is an elegantly photographed tale of a thirty-something Chinese-American woman and her rocky relationship with the well-meaning but uncomprehending father, Mr Shi (a tremendous performance from Henry O), who arrives from Beijing for an extended visit. The void between the two is explored with equal measures of wit and poignancy. Mr Shi finds that he has more rewarding exchanges with ‘Madame’, an Iranian grandmother with whom he shares no common language, than he does with his own daughter.

The Princess Of Nebraska, meanwhile, is an edgier, more experimental piece, shot on the hoof with non-actors. The eponymous ‘princess’ is a young Chinese woman in her early twenties who arrives in America to study, only to discover that she is pregnant. Says Wang, “What I found interesting was that there was such a difference between the three generations – between the father, who went through the cultural revolution, suffered and was very affected by it, to the daughter in the story who was indirectly affected by it. And then the new generation who grew up in the new China, which is basically all about consumerism and making money. They know very little, even about Tiananmen Square. For me, the question really becomes, what is the future of China?”

The material from Yiyun Li’s collection of short stories struck a personal chord with Wang. We’re talking about the significance of food and shared mealtimes in the films and he recalls his own experience as a Chinese student in America who had dropped out of a medicine degree in order to pursue a career in the arts. “My father kind of freaked out and came over to live with me for a little bit, in the same way that Mr Shi does in the film. And I remember the dinners were just like that – he asked me very personal questions. Are you seeing any girlfriend? What is she like? The more he asked, the more I didn’t want to answer. Dinners became really, really silent and awkward. Then one day he even said, ‘You have so little money in your cheque account, why didn’t you tell me?’ He went through my things and looked at my cheque book!”

While both the films deal with Chinese immigration to the US, Wang says that he would like to shoot a film in China itself. “But that would be very difficult because of censorship. For example, this film was originally half financed by China, but in the end, because of some of the lines in the script, we couldn’t make that happen. They didn’t like the line: ‘Communism is not bad, it just fell into the wrong hands.’

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