Screenings

University of Sydney Screening

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University of Sydney Screening

Following our morning excursions to the Sydney Opera House and Bondi Beach, we went to the University of Sydney for our evening show. The screening, sponsored by the Confucius Institute and the China Education Centre, was held at the Education Building in Lecture Theatre 351 at 6:30pm. They brought a nice-sized turnout to the screening, with about 60-70 people in attendance. Uncle Clement brought some of his colleagues, and a classmate of my father’s was also at the screening. It’s been great to travel around the world meeting people who have some connection to our parents or to Qiu Jin. We certainly didn’t expect this when we started the project!

It was also nice to meet Sue Wiles, an independent scholar who wrote her thesis on Qiu Jin. Her paper questioned whether or not Qiu Jin was more of a feminist or patriot. Wiles felt Qiu Jin leaned more towards the nationalist side. In China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, Qiu Jin is definitely know more for her patriotic and nationalist efforts. With Autumn Gem, we present both sides of the argument, and we let the viewer decide for themselves. This is probably why her story is so interesting — there is no clear cut answer!

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University of New South Wales Screening

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Rae at the University of New South Wales

We had a screening at the University of New South Wales yesterday afternoon. Thanks to Professor Haiqing Yu who set up our first screening of Autumn Gem on international soil! We had mostly academics and professors at the screening, and this led to a very good discussion about how best to promote and distribute our film to educational markets. We’re beginning a big push to get Autumn Gem in 2011, namely because it’s the 100-year anniversary of the fall of the Qing Dynasty. We’re betting that many people will be wondering, “What was the role of women in the early 20th century?” We want the answer to be to watch Autumn Gem!

Before the trip, I was thinking about leaving the laptop at home and bringing just the iPad to run our Keynote presentation and present the movie. I’m glad that I didn’t, because I needed the MacBook Pro to interface with the projector in the Robert Webster Building. The resolution was locked to 1280 pixels wide, and I couldn’t find a way to change that from the projector control panel. The iPad’s VGA adapter outputs at 1024×768, so everything looked stretched on the screen. Switching to the laptop and setting the resolution to 1280×768 fixed things. The takeaway from all of this? Always bring a backup!

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Autumn Gem Screening Map

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I spent the evening adding markers to a Google Map showing all the places where Autumn Gem has and will be screened. Our Summer and Fall 2010 tour schedule will be taking us to Australia, Texas, Vancouver, and Southern California! It’s amazing that in the past year and a half, we’ve shown Autumn Gem in over fifty places across the country!

We will continually update this map as the film makes its way to more and more places around the globe!

Saratoga Public Library Screening Recap and Photos

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Autumn Gem at the Saratoga Public Library

On Sunday, the Chi Am Circle club sponsored a screening of Autumn Gem at the Saratoga Public Library. Ninety people were in attendance for the screening, including Qiu Jin’s Great Grandnephew, Charles Fan, whom we first met at the Willow Glen screening back in March. Now that we’re back from our Spring 2010 Tour, we have time to start planning our next steps with the film: more screenings, interviews, a study guide for the Institutional version of the DVD and the iPad application.

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Stony Brook University Screening Recap

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Stony Brook University screening of Autumn Gem

The Spring 2010 Autumn Gem Tour featured 13 screenings in 18 days. Our final stop before returning to the Bay Area was at State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island. Saying goodbye to my relatives in New Jersey, we took an early morning train to New York’s Penn Station. We didn’t head immediately to Long Island, as I had to make a quick jaunt over to the All Things Digital “East Coast Office” in Midtown. The differences between the two cities of Boston and New York were readily apparent as we walked between the towering skyscrapers. Boston had more of an old-time colonial and working class feel to it, whereas New York had a more hustle and bustle, white-collar feel. I can understand how intense a rivalry can develop between these two cities (esp. in sports); the variations here are more apparent than those between Northern California and Southern California cities.

We spent just an hour inside the News Corp. building before leaving to return back to Penn Station for our Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) train ride. I didn’t realize the News Corp. building had a subway stop in the basement — convenient! I’m very fortunate that I’m able to work remotely while on tour. We couldn’t have produced Autumn Gem without having the flexibility to work virtually anywhere, be it in China, Las Vegas or the East Coast. My motto is “Have Internet, will travel!”

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Brookdale Community College Screening Recap

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Brookdale Community College

The previous day’s double feature, coupled with the lengthy and hectic travel to get to New Jersey, left us pretty tired. But, we were now on the home stretch and nothing would get in the way of our completing this tour! Fortunately, the next screening at Brookdale Community College was extremely well organized. Linda Wang and her students in the Brookdale Asia Society were very proactive in getting the word out to students and the outside community. We also got great publicity from the World Journal and from my uncle’s friends and colleagues. As a result of their efforts, we saw a large crowd of about 120-130 people at the screening. Asia Society even brought a popcorn maker, which brought an authentic movie viewing experience to the evening!

The night kicked off with an overview of Chinese history during the time of Qiu Jin by Michelle, a member of Brookdale Asia Society. This helped set the stage for our film, which was shown on dual projector screens in the room.

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Montclair State University

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Autumn Gem at Montclair State University

A short while after our first East Coast tour, we got an email from Montclair State University asking us if we would like to screen the film. It was this email and screening around which we scheduled our Spring 2010 tour. By locking in the date early on, we were able to plan all the stops before and after. For instance, knowing that we didn’t have to be in New Jersey until the sixth of April, we were able to schedule the Southwest and Maryland/Massachusetts portions of the tour. There’s a saying about beginning with the end in mind, and we followed that to a hilt!

After lunch at Kean University, Rae and I hopped back into our rental car and drove further up the highway to Montclair. As with the past few days, the weather was unusually warm for this time of year on the East Coast, and we saw many people wearing what amounted to summer clothes. On the day we left to return home to the Bay Area, the weather suddenly went from 80 degrees to 50-60 degrees! I doubt many of them are wearing t-shirts and shorts now!

Before the screening, Professor Roberta Friedman told us that we would be interviewed at the DuMont Television Station. We felt like television or movie stars while sitting in the studio, which had an uncanny resemblance to a talk show set. I wish we had a setup like this when we were filming our interior scenes! As we stated in our presentation, we built a set in our garage for the film. Because space was so cramped inside the garage, we could only film from the garage-door side. To get around this limitation, we rearranged the furniture and hung up different scroll paintings on the walls. And ta da! We had a “different” room! It would have been a whole lot better, however, if we had access to a setup like in DuMont!

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