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China, United States · 2017
1h 30m
Director Miao Wang
Starring
Genre Documentary
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Stella and Harry are part of the so-called "Parachute Generation" of young people from China whose parents send them to the U.S. alone to enroll in private schools. This documentary follows the two affluent Chinese teenagers as they settle into Fryeburg Academy, a boarding school in small-town Maine, as they chase the American dream.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
Maineland takes up a large and complicated set of topics — the global economy, the shifting relations between East and West, the commodification of American education — and addresses them with understated delicacy.
Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
That relaxed joyfulness is balanced by the challenges of the states: weight gain, being stereotyped, the emphasis on fun with friends rather than preparation for all the life ahead. You can see, over the school year Wang documents, the kids’ certainties about what matters most eroding.
RogerEbert.com by Godfrey Cheshire
A documentary that offers some fascinating if glancing insights into a rich and timely subject but ends up being more frustrating than enlightening.
The Hollywood Reporter by Justin Lowe
Wang’s verite approach attempts to strike a tone somewhere between revealing and contemplative, but her principal subjects are too young and inexperienced with the world to have much of import to say.
Los Angeles Times by Michael Rechtshaffen
While it scratches an admittedly reflective surface, you keep hoping the nicely photographed Maineland would have dug a bit deeper.
Maineland is informative in the most basic ways. But the big hole in Wang’s film is in failing to capture the disconnect, the true culture shock of children of neon bedecked skyscrapers, mansions and coddling parents packed off to the backwoods of Maine. And the second biggest hole is missing the frison that must have been experienced by both sides in this exchange.
Building a new life in the Canadian suburbs, a Korean mother and son struggle with a growing rift between them.