New Jersey Chinese Community Center Recap and Photos

Our final stop in our seven screenings in six days week was at the New Jersey Chinese Community Center. Thanks to Tien-Fang Hou for bringing a great crowd to the screening. Coincidentally, Tien-Fang’s grandson trains at the same wushu school as Melissa, the girl who played the young Qiu Jin in our film. Small world! All in all, we had about 75 people at the event, which was well organized by my Uncle Don.

Screening venues have varied on this tour; we’ve shown the films in theaters, classrooms, and auditoriums. Whenever possible, we have tried to stagger the chairs in the latter two to reduce the amount of heads moving laterally back and forth to read the subtitles. Often times, the people in front are blocking the view of the captions in the film. I really liked how Slumdog Millionaire moved the subtitles away from the traditional spot in the bottom third of the screen. Though I don’t know if it would be effective in our film, given the amount of text being displayed on-screen, but it’s something I certainly keep wondering about. With films, there’s always that “one last change” that you’d like to make. Eventually, however, you have to put your foot down and say, “No more changes!”

We’ll have four screenings coming up this week. Connecticut College, Brown, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center. Though it’s a far cry from the seven in six days, we’ll be traveling a much greater distance. We’re renting a car tomorrow morning to head up from New Jersey to Connecticut. Almost a year and a half ago, we went to interview Professors Amy Dooling and Lingzhen Wang for the film. Now, in just a few days, we’ll be screening at their respective colleges!

Here are photos from the Saturday night screening at the New Jersey Chinese Community Center.