The most powerful moment of Beyond Beijing. The International Women’s Movement was inspired by a downpour. “My camera got wet in the heavy rain, so I had an off-record conversation with Bi Shumin,” director Salo Chasnoff states in text scrolling over a snapshot of two smiling Chinese women, one of whom is Shumin, a doctor who spent 12 years in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution
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before becoming an author. “She told me she had always thought of hereself simply as writer, uninflected by gender. Because of her experience in this forum, now sees herself in a landscape of women, flooded with their stories. She has begun to think of herself as a woman writer. This moment–the rain, her work and her face, the passion of her companion are etched in my memory.”
She waited tables and mimed in an off-off-Broadway production of Alice In Wonderland before settling in Evanston and going back to school. Last year she completed her PhD in performance studies at Northwestern University.
