Several years after completing Bumming in Beijing (see March 5), director Wu returns to the lives of his five friends, now dispersed about the globe. What is immediately evident is the hardship of adapting to new cultures, of re-forming some sense of "Chineseness" within very different social and political landscapes. Zhang Ci struggles with her identity as a writer while raising children in California; Gao Bo, now living in Paris with his young wife, draws tourist portraits beneath the Eiffel Tower; the painter Zhang Dali stalks the streets of Bologna spray painting Chinese graffiti; and the fragile Zhang Xia Ping has all but abandoned her artistic pursuits while living as a hausfrau in Austria. Only Mou Sen, the avant-garde theater director, stays in Beijing, but is invited to present a play at a festival in Belgium. At Home in the World marks in poignant terms the importance of cultural identity, as each of Wu's émigré artists confronts the irony of a well-reasoned exile that continually calls forth the absence of home.