My hunch: This is taken on a set of one of his four silent films, circa mid to late 1920s. Questions: Who is this little girl? Third Aunt, my mother’s elder sister? A child actress? How common was it for children to appear in movies at the time? Were these children relatives of the filmmakers, or “professional” actors?

Right now, I am inclined to believe that this is a photo of my Third Aunt, posing on a movie set. I want very much for this to be the case, but I may not be able to prove it one way or another.

What joy!

I first learned about it from Sr. Anna Boland, MM, who passed away unexpectedly last month while visiting her sister in Ohio. Sister was keen on introducing me to the exhibit, and its sponsor, Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCRW)–the group that supported Health Care Reform in spite of the contrary position taken by the U.S, Council of Catholic Bishops–because she was proud of being a Sister with progressive views. She gave me their website and her only copy of brochure.

For more information about the exhibit and LCRW, please visit http://www.womenandspirit.org/index.html.

Because we decided to stay the night at the Center as guests of one of the Sisters, the three of us had time to chat and to reflect on our priorities. These were luxuries of time that we could not have afforded in our everyday work lives.

Inevitably, however, we could not avoid talking about our professional work. One of my friends asked if I intended to publish my “Grandfather Project” as a book. Wouldn’t you want to be a full professor before you retire? Wouldn’t a book be “easier” to accomplish than what you are doing now?

I make my case that doing research for the documentary film “Trailblazers In Habits” is as labor intensive and time consuming as for a conventional book project, and that conceptualizing the film’s narrative construct is a creative process. In other words, I have not been idle. But if my institution does not consider this to be credible creative work, so be it.

As for my “Grandfather Project,” I have resisted from the very beginning the idea of writing a conventional book. I do not have any interest in writing a “Roots” type of Chinese American story, the type that commercial publishers appear to favor. I have grander ambition.

Yes, I want to tell my grandfather’s story (and my story). But more importantly, I am determined to finish his work, to realize his dream. He was an unsung pioneer in Chinese film history. He made silent films in the 1920s, in Guangzhou, China. Even after he closed his production company and spent the rest of his working life as a restaurant manager in the United States, he continued to write for the stage and the screen. I want to stage these plays and make these films.

Maybe I won’t finish the project before it’s time for me to retire. So be it.

I will keep the post but ignore comments that don’t contribute to the dialog.

The Institute for Multimedia Literacy within the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California is seeking project proposals for exemplary Sophie 2.0 projects to be produced in collaborations between scholars and IML staff. If you have a project that would benefit from the unique compositional affordances of Sophie, and you wouldn’t mind having these become showcase projects on the Sophie 2.0 Web site, please contact Holly Willis. Include a project description and explain why Sophie 2.0 would enhance the project.

This call for proposals has my name on it. I will submit my proposal for making my “Grandfather Project” a Sophie project next week. I have been wanting to use Sophie for my projects for a long time, ever since I went to Brooklyn to meet Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book and he introduced me to Sophie.