Wang's 'Princess'

For what may be the first time ever, an established filmmaker has bypassed an official theater premiere — and put his work directly on the internet.

Last Friday, director Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska made its public debut on YouTube's Screening Room. It has since garnered nearly 153,000 views and hundreds of comments. The trailer — put on YouTube last month — has an impressive 95,000 tally.

The film follows a contemporary Chinese girl named Sasha (Ling Li). During her stay in Nebraska as an exchange student, she discovers she is pregnant with the child of a man she met in China.

Sasha embarks on a pilgrimage to San Francisco for an abortion, exploring random intimate encounters interlaced with text messages to the man who impregnated her — he never responds — and a mobile video diary.

Unlike companion film A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, released in theaters last month, Princess is grittier. "It's shot on these really accessible digital cameras, it's framed really tight," said Wang, known for a variety of oeuvres exploring Chinese society, from '80s indie Chan is Missing to The Joy Luck Club.

Magnolia Pictures holds the North American distribution rights to both films. It worked in tandem with Cinetic Rights Management and YouTube to devise a distribution strategy "consistent with the way the piece was conceived and produced," Wang added.

Releasing a film on the internet not only makes independent work more accessible to consumers; it liberates distributors from the advertising and publicity typically required for a traditional theatrical release, observes the SF Chronicle.

"The internet's ability to provide free streaming video is going to radically redefine independent film's access and availability to its audience," declared Magnolia's Ray Price. But The New York Times expressed suspicions that Wang's YouTube release may be a one-time gimmick, not a "harbinger of what's to come."

The Princess of Nebraska was produced with leftover budget from A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and was not positioned as a viable competitor against the 14 films that premiered in theatres on Friday. If nothing else, an internet release may have been its one shot at mainstream consumption.