The Princess of Nebraska finds YouTube success

photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

After playing at some festivals both here and abroad (including Telluride and Toronto), Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska skipped a theatrical run and went straight to YouTube, where it premiered in early October. The film is a companion piece to A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, currently playing in select theaters.

The YouTube page describes the film thusly: "Sasha (Ling Li) is part of the new youth generation of China, unbeholden to traditions and history, always trying to find themselves in the present moment. An exchange student in Nebraska, Sasha is pregnant after a one-night stand with Yang, a young man she knew briefly in Beijing. He was a nan dan, a male actor who specializes in female roles in the Beijing Opera. She departs for San Francisco, where she plans to get an abortion. Sasha soon meets X, a bar hostess who reminds her of Yang, and they entertain a group of businessmen in a private karaoke room. Later she spends the night with X. Throughout, Sasha is text-messaging Yang, who never responds. She also creates a video diary with her cell phone which is intercut throughout the narrative. Along with her yearning for freedom, she also longs for connection."

Although YouTube is no stranger to premiering films, this particular flick caught the attention of A.O. Scott of the New York Times, who recently reviewed it. Although his review is lukewarm, the critic is interested in the idea of premiering a film online and talked about it at length. "It may seem, at first glance, that bypassing theaters shows a lack of faith in the quality of the movie," he wrote. "But as of Sunday afternoon, the film had attracted more than 140,000 views, which is a larger audience than it would have found in a limited art-house release in New York and Los Angeles. (And the film is not notably worse than what you might see in those theaters.)"

One of the interesting things to come out of posting the film on YouTube lies in the comments section, which Scott also noted in his review. "Whether all those views reflect people watching until the end is hard to know, but some of their reactions are collected in comments on the site, ranging from thoughtful analyses to 'THIS HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH NEBRASKA.'"

No word on whether Scott plans to continue his review of online films in the future, but it's not hard to imagine a world where this might become very commonplace. What does he think of that? "Is the YouTube release of a feature film by a well-known director a gimmick or a harbinger of things to come? A little of both, probably," he wrote in his review. "It’s not clear how a film given away free can make money, but for viewers, the experience is not bad."

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