Nancy Kelly is a self-taught filmmaker who, having fallen in love with filmmaking, quit her job and moved from Massachusetts to the high desert on the California/Nevada border in the 1980s. Though she had never ridden a horse or made a documentary, she learned to do both, making her living as a ranch hand while she shot award-winning shorts “A Cowhand’s Song” and “Cowgirls.”

The Kino Lorber Repertory release of the new 4K restoration (by IndieCollect) of Kelly’s “Thousand Pieces of Gold” can be screened at virtual cinemas via Kino Marquee starting April 24. There will be a live Q&A on YouTube on April 29 at 8:00 p.m. ET/5:00p.m. PT with Kelly, actors Rosalind Chao and Chris Cooper, producer Kenji Yamamoto, and screenwriter Anne Makepeace.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

NK: Set in a mining town in the 1880s, “Thousand Pieces of Gold” was developed by the Sundance Institute and premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1990.

It tells the real-life story of Lalu (Rosalind Chao), a young Chinese woman whose desperately poor parents sell her into slavery. She is trafficked to a nefarious saloonkeeper in Idaho’s gold country. Eventually Charlie (Chris Cooper), a man of different ilk, wins her in a poker game and slowly gains her trust.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

NK: I discovered Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s novel “Thousand Pieces of Gold” while touring with my documentary “Cowgirls,” and immediately saw it as a narrative feature. The book is a biographical novel of the true story of Lalu Nathoy, an extraordinary woman who had to fight for independence and freedom in the early American West after she was sold by her father and eventually trafficked to Idaho to a mining town.

I was drawn to it because I had made two non-fiction films set there and because I had worked as a cowgirl in the high desert on the California/Nevada border. I thought I knew a lot about the region, but I did not know anything about the sexual slavery of Chinese women during the Gold Rush.

I was attracted to this story of a young Chinese slave girl’s empowerment, of her courage and grit. I was also drawn to it because it is about racism and immigration. My mother- and father-in-law, John and Masako Yamamoto, are American citizens, yet they spent the four years of World War II imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp.

I was also drawn to it because it is about the devastation of sexual trafficking.

W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?

NK: I want them to be floating on air, inspired by this story of Lalu’s empowerment, how Lalu saved herself from prostitution, from slavery, how she became her own woman. I want them to be moved by the love story between Lalu and Charlie.

I want them to feel that “Thousand Pieces of Gold” was way ahead of its time, that it resonates even more powerfully today in the era of #MeToo.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

NK: It’s hard to say what was the biggest challenge, because as soon as we got one seemingly impossible piece of the project together, something even more impossible took its place. But by far and away, the biggest challenge was raising the funds for the film with me in place as the director. Filmmaker Rachel Lyon (“Tell Me a Riddle”) and our lawyer, Peter Buchanan, convinced Kenji Yamamoto, my husband and filmmaking partner, and me that if I wanted to direct, we needed to raise the money ourselves.

Next, who would adapt the novel to the screenplay? Kenji and I loved our friend Anne Makepeace’s original script (“Jewels”) and hired her – a wonderful partnership was born.

Anne says, “As a writer, I had to travel back in time to enter the 19th century hearts and minds of characters who were foreign to me: a strong young woman from a nomadic family in northern China; an American drifter; a Chinese mule skinner; a saloonkeeper; the hopeful, frustrated miners whose claims were playing out; and the few women in town – all prostitutes.”

Based on one of Anne’s early drafts, the Sundance Lab invited the three of us there to work on the screenplay. This was crucial. American Playhouse Theatrical Films backed the draft Anne wrote after we attended the lab.

The next biggest challenge: finding a location. This was a labor of love; Kenji scoured the West for a location. In the commercialized gold rush towns in California, we would have had to spend enormous amounts of money to parking meters and cover the paved streets with dirt. Kenji scouted extremely remote actual gold rush towns that were impossible for production. He even scouted the real gold rush town where Lalu lived, Warrens Diggins, Idaho, which was so remote, he could only get there by snowmobile!

Finally, through a convergence of circumstances, he discovered Nevada City, Montana, a gold rush town assembled by Charlie Bovey, an eccentric heir to the General Mills fortune. Bovey had collected gold rush buildings from all over the American West, including a Chinatown. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Nevada City was a tourist attraction, a kind of gold rush Disneyland. And it was along a two-lane highway! We leased Nevada City for the three months before its season opened and its 19th century saloon, hotel, and weathered shacks became our set.

Next question: who would play Lalu? The first morning of our search, casting director Lora Kennedy brought Rosalind Chao (“Joy Luck Club”). Rosalind’s mother, who speaks Mandarin, taught her the lines of one of the audition scenes in Mandarin. It took some gentle persuasion on Rosalind’s part, but she did that scene in Mandarin. Her audition was unforgettable. We went on to audition actresses on three continents, and no one came close to Rosalind’s Lalu.

Finally, the fun began. Co-producer Sarah Green (“Tree of Life”) says, “The special thing about that production is how bonded we were as a team, both cast and crew. We all went to that pub for dinner after wrap, then to the movie theater to watch dailies, then to the hot springs up the road to rest our bodies. We played horseshoes in the horseshoe shaped center of the cabins we all lived in, and we’d go en masse to the Boiling River in Yellowstone Park on Sundays. So my strongest contribution, I feel, was in helping to put together the team. Bobby Bukowski and his camera/grip/electric crew, Dan Bishop, Dianna Freas, and their art department, Judy Karp and her sound team, and so on.”

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

NK: From the moment I read the novel, I wanted to direct the film, which wasn’t a likely scenario; I had only directed two documentary shorts! We knew that if we raised the money ourselves, if we were the producers, we could hire the director. And that I would be the director. It took us six years.

Novel in hand, we raised the development funds from individuals through a limited partnership. Then, with Anne’s script, we raised about a couple hundred thousand dollars in production funds, but “Thousand Pieces of Gold” is a period piece – that was nowhere near enough.

PBS’s “American Playhouse” was supporting narrative features about people ignored by Hollywood and made by people left out of the studio system. Whenever I was in the same room as Lindsay Law, Executive Director of “American Playhouse,” I reminded him about “Thousand Pieces of Gold.” “American Playhouse” backed the draft Anne wrote after the glorious June lab at Sundance. Lindsay told me later that that draft convinced him the film could be made on a limited independent film budget.

Even with “American Playhouse’s” backing, we were only halfway to our $1.7 million budget. We were stymied for months, but Kenji kept saying, “We need to find a maverick.” Finally, Mitch Block, who distributed my two documentaries, introduced me to Sidney Kantor, who was partners with John Sham, a Hong Kong producer. Their company’s name? Maverick Productions.

The $100,000 that Rachel Lyon brought in from the UK’s Film Four International made the production a bit easier.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

NK: Worst advice came from a mentor early in my career: “You will never make it as a director. You are too nice.”

Best advice: Early in my career when I was in the midst of editing “Cowgirls,” loving it, and wanting to make more films, I asked Academy Award-winning documentarian Julia Reichert for advice. I begged her to tell me how I would make living, where I should live, and what kind of films to make. Wisely, Julia didn’t answer me specifically. Instead, she told me something I have carried with me throughout my career: “It all depends on what kind of life experience you want to have.”

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

NK: Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t direct films just because you are female. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t direct a film with a woman in the lead. There has always been an audience for those films — it’s a matter of finding the people smart enough to recognize that.

In my case, one of those people is Sandra Schulberg (“Exposed”), an accomplished producer. I got to know her when “Thousand Pieces of Gold” was in distribution and she was senior executive for “American Playhouse”/Playhouse International Pictures. She’s a longtime advocate of “Off-Hollywood” filmmakers. She founded the Independent Feature Project in the late ’70s and is now President and Executive Director of IndieCollect, which rescues and restores American independent films. Many, many of those films are being lost because the 35mm prints were so damaged they wouldn’t go through a projector and the film-to-video transfers were horrible. This was certainly the case with “Thousand Pieces of Gold.” Kenji and I worked with Sandra and IndieCollect to digitally restore “Thousand Pieces of Gold” and it’s gorgeous.

Another champion is Jonathan Hertzberg, Director of Theatrical Distribution & Marketing at Kino Lorber. When they acquired the digital 4K restoration of “Thousand Pieces of Gold,” he listed its marketing pluses: woman director, woman in the lead, and an immigration story.

Chris Cooper, who played Charlie in the film, told me recently, “It’s interesting to think that among my first three films, two of them had women directors. I never saw the problem with it. I did two films last year with women directors and was really happy that they both espoused kindness and humanity, especially in this climate.”

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

NK: Very early in my career, I saw Gillian Armstrong’s “My Brilliant Career.” I desperately needed examples of films directed by women with women in the lead, which were few and far between. Armstrong was a pioneer. “My Brilliant Career” was the first Australian feature-length film to be directed by a woman in nearly five decades. And, like “Thousand Pieces of Gold,” it was a period piece about a woman’s empowerment.

W&H:  How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?

NK: Fortunately, so far, none of Kenji’s and my loved ones have gotten COVID-19.

I miss the freedom of my normal life, but in the quiet, I am rewriting the script for a project I have long wanted to make, “When We Were Cowgirls,” a feminist adventure story loosely based on my own experiences as a ranch hand.