Born Jan. 3, 1905, in Los Angeles' Chinatown, Wong played the lead role in the first Technicolor feature, The Toll of the Sea, in 1922, when she was just 17. By 19 she was intriguing against the movies' top action star, Douglas Fairbanks, in his super-production The Thief of Bagdad. At 23 she went to Europe, where she starred in a half-dozen A pictures - including her best one, E.A. Dupont's Piccadilly - and, when sound films arrived, performing roles in three languages: English, German and French.
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Categories: Film Festivals Best Films
The Rose of Rhodesia (1918), one of the earliest feature films made in South Africa, presented at this year's Giornate del Cinema Muto is a five-reel romance cantered on a stolen diamond, an interracial friendship, and an anti-colonial uprising, The Rose of Rhodesia impressed contemporary reviewers with its daring realism, spectacular outdoor locations, and casting of African actors in prominent roles. Considered lost for most of the last century, the film may claim to be the first fictional treatment of Zimbabwe in cinema.
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