Mao’s Last Dancer

Before you can fly, you have to be free.

An inspiring true story of a young dancer's journey from rural poverty under communist control to artistic freedom and love in the West.

At the age of 11, Li was plucked from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange to Texas, he falls in love with an American woman. Two years later, he managed to defect and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet.