Cross the Great Water
Project Summary
TITLE
Cross the Great Water
BUDGET RANGE
AU$7,500,000 – AU$9,500,000
FORMAT
35mm / Colour
RUNNING TIME
110 minutes
LANGUAGES
English (60%), Cantonese (35%), Fijian (5%)
SHOOTING LOCATIONS
TBC
PRODUCTION PHASE
Negotiating proposed financing and distribution offers / strategies.
SCHEDULE
Pre-production: 18 April 2011 – 10 July 2011 (12 weeks)
Principal Photography: 11 July 2011 – 25 September 2011 (11 weeks)
Delivery: June 2012
Theatrical: end 2012
LOG LINE
1902. On a remote Pacific Island, a young Chinese nun falls in love with a rebellious Governor’s son just weeks before she is about to take her final vows.
PITCH SYNOPSIS
Fiji Isles, 1902. Catherine, a Chinese nun, falls in love with Jack, rebellious son of a colonial Governor. Raised in China, Jack knows more about China than Fijian-born Catherine. Jack asks Catherine to marry him. Torn between her vocation and Jack, Catherine chooses the convent. Devastated when Jack leaves, Catherine begins an epic journey to China to win back her love.
GENRE STATEMENT
Cross the Great Water is a historical romance, interweaving the stories of two couples whose lives are shaped by British imperialism at the turn of the century. This double-romance structure has permitted the writing of a number of intimate scenes which will enable the filmmakers to minimise production costs while retaining the sense of an epic film. The historical romance film is one of cinema’s oldest genres, to which four of the top ten highest grossing movies of all time (adjusted for inflation) belong: Gone with the Wind, Titanic, The Sound of Music and Doctor Zhivago.
TARGET AUDIENCES
The appeal of Cross the Great Water is that it harks back to a bygone era of old Hollywood. Like movies such as those mentioned above, Cross the Great Water is a love story set in a time before cynicism. The film’s primary audience is women, specifically Millennials (18-24), and Generation X to Mature, with a parallel audience of 40 million Chinese Diaspora around the world, many of whom are descended from the gold miners and railway workers who left Southern China in the mid 1800s.
STORY, CHARACTERS AND STRUCTURE
Cross the Great Water is inspired by real events from the writer’s family history. The writer’s mother, who is Chinese, was a nun at an orphanage in Fiji. She was three months away from taking her final vows and had been chosen to become the convent’s next mother superior, when the writer’s father (a European missionary from New Zealand) arrived, changing the course of her life.
The subplot centres on the character of HUNG who is based on the writer’s great-great grandfather. Originally from Taishan, Canton, he endured deplorable living conditions and extreme racial prejudice in the Australian gold mines. Like many other Chinese miners, he began to fear for his life. To escape, he stole an open 14-foot boot, sailed to Fiji through shark-infested waters and, against all odds, arrived one month later. He was the first Chinese man in Fiji.
In many ways Cross the Great Water follows the conventions typical of epic cinematic love stories. However, atypically, it has a bifurcated structure similar to The Godfather Part 2 – flashbacks show the hardship endured by the heroine’s parents before the time of her birth. The love story of HUNG an MON SING runs parallel to the story of SISTER CATHERINE and JACK, informing CATHERINE’S decisions as she grapples with a personal journey of discovery and an inter-racial love that dare not be.
