Isaac Julien’s new movie explores the movement of people across countries and continents and meditates on unfinished journeys. The movie combines fact, fiction and film essay genres against a background of Chinese history, legend and landscape to create a meditation on global human migrations.

The original inspiration for Ten Thousand Waves was the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which 23 Chinese cockle-pickers died. In response to this event, Julien commissioned the poet Wang Ping to come to England and write Small Boats, a poem that is recited in the work. In the successive years, Julien has spent time in China slowly coming to understand the country and its people’s perspectives and developing the relationships that have enabled him to undertake this multifaceted work.

The U.S. premiere took place at Miami Beach’s Bass Museum of Art on Thursday December 2, 2010 in an epic exhibition called ISAAC JULIEN/Creative Caribbean Network