I didn’t manage to fall back to sleep after 3 am, so I spent much of the morning scanning the web, trying to read (too tired to focus, though), chatted a bit with Annika back in Finland, and eventually made my way to the breakfast, hoping to grasp a bit of sleep after, but failed at that, too. I had to give in to the fact that nope, there’s no avoiding the jetlag this time around either…
The day started off with us visiting our Chinese distributor of Iron Sky The Coming Race. We screened an unfinished version of the film to them to get them an understanding on what kind of a film they are putting out, and also in order to begin the dialogue about the requirements for the Chinese launch. There was something wrong with the playout, though, with bits of audio missing here and there and some apparent mistakes that had found their way into the cut, so I was a bit frustrated watching it, but luckily the people didn’t seem to mind. Ah, well; as a director, there’s no way to watch your film without seeing every mistake in there, no matter how big or small.
Then, there was a heavy lunch few miles away with the distributors. A lot of great seafood and talk about Chinese film in general, how and which direction it’s going. Then we went back to the hotel. I dozed off on the way there, and woke up as we screeched to a halt in the front. Few more hours of total blackness in my room, then off to the APSFcon, for the Gravity Awards Ceremony.
APFScon is held at the Science Museum in Beijing. The building is massive, and it took us forever to go around it to find the correct entrance. We made it just in time to be seated as the ceremony begun.
Well, it was all in Chinese, so nothing very interesting for us; they did have a board which auto-translated the speeches, but the translation was impossible Google-translated gibberish which made even less sense. Some awards were handed, some applauds were had, and then it was all over.
We tried to hail a cab from down the road, but failed at it miserably. Our only solution was in the end to get Tanja on the WeChat to get us a Didi from a nearby restaurant. We stopped off somewhere close to the hotel and headed for a “light” dinner – meaning we ordered two foods and stuffed ourselves to near-death state with Tsingtao beer and amazing pork and chicken. Didn’t take long for me to fall asleep as I crashed in the hotel room.
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