WCC Film Series:Thousand Pieces of Gold

FEATURED FILM:
Title: Thousand Pieces of Gold
Year: 1991
Director: Nancy Kelly
Starring: Rosalind Chao, Chris Cooper, Michael Paul Chan
Rated: PG-13 (Sexual Situations, Violence, Language)
Run Time: 1hr 45mins

A young Chinese woman fights for her independence after she is sold into marriage and forced to live in a gold rush boomtown. In the early 1870s, at the age of 18, a young Chinese woman, who would later become known as Polly Bemis, was sold into a forced marriage. She was trafficked across the Pacific to San Francisco (using Butte's historic downtown as proxy), and sent to a gold-mining camp in Idaho, though the entire film was produced east of the Bitterroot Mountains in Madison County. In Idaho she became concubine to wealthy Chinese businessman Hong King, before eventually gaining her freedom and homesteading along the Salmon River with husband, Charlie Bemis. Thousand Pieces of Gold, based upon the biography by Ruth Lum McCunn, dramatizes real episodes in Polly’s life to imagine her journey towards personal autonomy in an intersectional Western narrative that was decades ahead of its time.

Chinese American actress Rosalind Chao’s first notable role was a guest appearance as a South Korean refugee on the series finale of M*A*S*H, which she reprised as a main cast member in the short-lived follow-up, After MASH. She later had a recurring role on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as a Japanese exo-botanist and currently stars in Netflix’s adaptation of the acclaimed Chinese sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem. In the Western biopic Thousand Pieces of Gold, Chao brings pioneer Polly Bemis to life with weary innocence and cautious curiosity. Through her portrayal we see the American West through the eyes of a foreigner, experiencing in equal parts the horror of hostile territory and the thrill of new experiences. This summer, the Wachholz College Center is excited to launch the WCC FILM SERIES, an ongoing series featuring a variety of films and film themes throughout each season. Each film will feature a short talk-back to begin the evening, providing the audience with important information and interesting facts about the film(s) they are about to view.

The theme for the summer of 2025 is MADE IN MONTANA - featuring a selection of cinema highlighting several lesser-known movies that were shot under the Big Sky! While production crews often utilize Montana's stunning backgrounds to set the scene before retreating to the comfort of a studio lot, the seven feature films of this summer were created almost entirely in the Treasure State. Therefore, each one taps into the same culture and landscapes we all share and relates it back to us in new and surprising ways. We hope that by curating a lineup of Montana-centric cinema specifically for the community, audiences might find something new and surprising about our home state in each one of these films.