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Asian Pacific Island Studies

79 Spring Times of Ho Chi Minh
Santiago Alvarez
Producer: ICAIC
1969, 25 min., Color, Cuba
This impressionist biography on the leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam skillfully interweaves still photos, newsreel footage, and Ho Chi Minh's poetry. Depicting a life that spanned three re...

Abundant Land: Soil, Seeds, and Sovereignty
Natasha Florentino
Producer: Armen Zohrabian
2017, 60 min., Color, US
Abundant Land is a one-hour documentary about a Hawaiian community on Moloka’i opposing the biotech industry’s use of the island to test genetically engineered seeds. Agrochemical biotech corporations...

The Army Forced Them to Be Violent
Tino Saroengallo
2002, 43 min., Color, Indonesia
After the fall of President Suharto in May 1998, the student movement in Indonesia had to face the military/police repression in their fight for overall reform. Because of the repression and force th...

Camp Arirang
Diana S. Lee & Grace Yoon-Kung Lee
1995, 29 min., BW, US/South Korea
A gritty look at the camp towns surrounding U.S. military bases in South Korea. This documentary follows Yon Ja Kim, a charismatic 50-year-old former sex worker through American Town, a government sub...

Coming Full Circle: The Journey of a Korean Transgendered Adoptee
Larry Tung
2015, 24 min., Color, US/Korea
Pauline Park, a transgender rights activist in New York City, was born into a poor family in post-war Korea. Adopted by white American parents, she left Korea as a 7-month old baby boy and grew up in ...

Comrades
Edward Wong
1999, 26 min., Color, US
COMRADES is a personal documentary essay about two men who took part in the violent socialist struggles of the mid-20th century, only to face resistance and disillusionment. The producer's father, Yoo...

Dal Puri Diaspora
Richard Fung
2012, 80 min., Color, Canada
The recipe for dal puri traveled with indentured workers from India’s Gangetic plain to southern Caribbean colonies of Britain and the Netherlands in the 19th Century. In the 1960s the wrapped roti mi...

Daughters of Mother India
Vibha Bakshi
Producer: Vibha Bakshi & Maryann De Leo
2013, 45 min., Color, India
DAUGHTERS OF MOTHER INDIA reveals the aftermath of the horrific rape and murder of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi in December 2012. For weeks, mass protests filled the streets of India and the...

A Day of Plane Hunting
Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Producer: Democratic Peoples' Republic of Viet Nam
1968, 20 min., BW, Vietnam
This film demonstrates the crucial role that Vietnamese women played in the war. It focuses on the attempts made during the war to achieve the total participation of women in production, education and...

Devotion
Barbara Hammer
2000, 85 min., Color, Japan/US
DEVOTION investigates the extremely complex and hierarchical relationships among a loyal group of filmmakers who dedicated up to 30 years making films for one man--Ogawa Shinsuke. These heartbreaking ...

Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides
Lucy Craft, Karen Kasmauski & Kathryn Tolbert
2015, 26 min., Color, US
Three Japanese war brides trace their tumultuous journey to America as the young wives of US soldiers and civilians. Atsuko, Emiko and Hiroko were among tens of thousands of Japanese women who married...

Follow Your Heart: China's New Youth Movement
Duncan Jepson
2007, 89 min., Color, China
A revealing documentary on the work and life of successful and independent Chinese Hip-Hop artists and their cultural influence in a society rapidly changing from communism to consumerism. Clashing wi...

Forgotten Warriors
Kim Jin Yoel
Producer: PURN Productions
2005, 99 min., Color, South Korea
A fascinating documentary about one of the little known legacies of the Korean War (1950-53), FORGOTTEN WARRIORS tells the stories of women guerilla fighters for North Korea who were captured, held fo...

From Asia With Love
Sari Dalena
2002, 12 min., Color, US
A critical look at the proliferation of the mail-order bride industry in Asia and its representations of Asian women in the West....

Grandmother's Flower
Jeong-hyun Mun
2008, 89 min., Color, South Korea
When director Mun accidentally discovered the diaries of his late granduncle, who was mentally ill, he unexpectedly learned about his family's secret history. The small mountain village in South Jeoll...

Hafu - The Mixed-Race Experience in Japan
Megumi Nishikura & Lara Pérez Takagi
2013, 85 min., Color, Japan
HAFU is the unfolding journey of discovery into the intricacies of mixed-race Japanese and their multicultural experience in modern day Japan. The film follows the lives of five “hafus”–the Japanese t...

Hanoi, Tuesday the 13th
Santiago Alvarez
Producer: ICAIC
1967, 40 min., BW, Cuba
Filmed in Hanoi on December 13, 1966, this documentary records the lives of people in the Vietnam capital and surrounding countryside at the height of U.S. bombing. Their daily activities are presente...

Hiroshima Nagasaki Download
Shinpei Takeda
2010, 73 min., Color, US/Japan
In Spring of 2009, two former high school friends set out on a road trip from Vancouver, Canada, heading south towards the Mexican border. Along the way, they meet atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima a...

Homes Apart: Korea
J.T. Takagi & Christine Choy
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1991, 56 min., Color, US/Korea
They speak the same language, share a similar culture and once belonged to a single nation. When the Korean War ended in 1953, ten million families were torn apart. By the early 90's, as the rest of t...

Ideal Narration
Yau Ching
1993, 3 min., Color
A music video of the Internationale as a meditation on contemporary Chinese history, this short combines archival imagery and text, mapping out a space between idealism and propaganda....

The Imagined, the Longed-for, the Conquered and the Sublime
Roddy Bogawa
1994, 8 min., Color, US
The video is a collection of 'pure images' of landscape, redeeming these images for what they are. Taken, but unaltered, in the order they appear, from the films Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger ...

In Whose Name?
Nandini Sikand
2004, 11 min., Color
In Whose Name? is a filmic essay which explores the co-opting of icons by political agendas. This experimental short is told through personal narrative, Super 8mm home movies, Bollywood film clips an...

Indochina: Traces of a Mother
Idrissou Mora-Kpai
2011, 72 min., Color, France/Benin
INDOCHINA: TRACES OF A MOTHER documents a little-known chapter in African, Asian and French colonial history and the personal story of Christophe, a Beninese-Vietnamese orphan that returns to Vietnam ...

Jareena, Portrait of a Hijda
Prem Kalliat
1990, 25 min., Color, India
This video offers a profile of a transsexual and her community in the Indian city of Bangalore. It provides a unique insight into the lives of Hijdas, a society of eunuchs numbering in the tens of tho...

Kabul Kabul
Sedika Mojadidi
2000, 46 min., Color, US/Afghanistan
KABUL KABUL documents the filmmaker's journey back to Afghanistan after a 23 year absence. She recounts her struggle to reconcile the different levels of loss that many like her have experienced fro...

Laos: the Forgotten War
Santiago Alvarez
Producer: ICAIC
1967, 20 min., Color, Cuba
This Cuban film focuses on the history of foreign intervention in Laos, first by France and then by the United States. It shows how the liberation forces of Laos, under continuous U.S. bombing, were a...

Living Along the Fenceline
Lina Hoshino & Gwyn Kirk
Producer: Lina Hoshino, Gwyn Kirk & Deborah Lee
2012, 65 min., Color, US
LIVING ALONG THE FENCELINE tells the stories of seven grassroots women leaders from across the Pacific to Puerto Rico whose communities are affected by the U.S. military presence in their backyards. A...

Marriage
Bibo Liang
2001, 60 min., Color, China
MARRIAGE is an intimate portrait about the intersecting and antagonistic relations between generations and institutions. Filmed in 1997, it traces two sides of one mountain in a remote village in Sout...

Mask: A Field Report on Masked Performance
Liu Xiaojin
2000, 120 min., Color, China
Since the time of the Qing Dynasty, villagers of Xiaotun have performed a folk opera in which all the actors wear masks. Known as the “Guansuo Opera”, its performances were suspended during the Cultu...

Memories of a Forgotten War
Camilla Benolirao Griggers/Sari Lluch Dalena
Producer: Kawayan Films
2002, 57 min., Color, US/The Philippines
In the decade following the Spanish-American War, more Filipinos were killed by US troops than by the Spanish during the 300 years of colonial rule. More than 1 million Filipinos died between 1899 an...

The Momentary Enemy
Angel Velasco Shaw
Producer: Maria Christina Villaseñor
2008, 25 min., Color/BW, US/The Philippines
The Momentary Enemy takes a critical comparative look into the way mass media has represented the Philippine-American War, Vietnam and Iraq Wars since the turn of the century to present day. The video...

Mother
Jun seek TAE
2011, 102 min., Color, South Korea
MOTHER follows labor activist Lee So-seon, who for over 40 years organized for workers’ rights in South Korea. A courageous, yet humble woman, Lee’s activism began the day her son, iconic labor activi...

Nailed
Angel Velasco Shaw
1992, 50 min., Color
A Filipina's exploration of the Catholic Church and 400 years of colonialism in the Pacific region is woven in a montage of images, sounds, stories and performances. Inspired by Lucy Reyes, a woman wh...

North Korea: Beyond the DMZ
J.T. Takagi & Hye Jung Park
Edited by Dena Mermelstein
2003, 60 min., Color, North Korea/US
While this tiny state on the divided Korean peninsula is continually demonized in the U.S., few have any first hand knowledge of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. What is it like on the other...

Not Simply a Wedding Banquet
Mickey Chen & Ming-Hsiu Chen
1997, 50 min., Color, Taiwan
The first public gay wedding in Taiwan has stirred up considerable controversy, including a local campaign to ban this film. It tells the story of Yosheng and Gary, the first gay couple to have a publ...

People's War (Newsreel #43)
Newsreel
Producer: Newsreel
1969, 40 min., BW, US
This newly restored film records the mobilization and participation of the Vietnamese people in their country's fight against colonialism and foreign military aggression. Moving beyond the perception...

Promise and Unrest
Alan Grossman & Áine O’Brien
Producer: FOMACS in association with Ned Kelly Pictures
2010, 79 min., Color, Ireland
Through struggle and sacrifice migrant women often stand as sole breadwinners in the transnational family. Separated from her daughter Gracelle at 7 months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work...

Re:Orientations
Richard Fung
2016, 68 min., Color, Canada
A fascinating look into the lives and thoughts of seven Queer Pan-Asian Canadians as they look back on ORIENTATIONS, a 1984 documentary in which they featured. How have they changed? And how has the w...

Red Detachment of Women
People's Republic of China
Producer: People's Republic of China
1968, 105 min., Color, China
This film presents the famous ballet from China. It is a blend of traditional Western theatre, Peking opera, folk dance, calisthenics, and acrobatics. It tells the story of a women's military unit dur...

Remembering Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself.
Yvonne Welbon
1995, 30 min., Color, us/China
An autobiographical experimental documentary about the artist's experiences as an African-American woman living in Taiwan for six years. Recreations of time and place are presented through memories, h...

Repatriation
Dong-won Kim
Producer: PURN Productions
2003, 149 min., Color, South Korea
In the spring of 1992 documentary filmmaker Dong-won Kim met Cho Chang-son and Kim Seak-hyoung, two North Koreans arrested by South Korean authorities years before. Convicted of spying for the North, ...

San Jie Cao
Bibo Liang
2001, 60 min., Color, China
In an area south of Chengdu, a quickly evolving metropolitan city in the remote high mountains, lies the home of the Moso people, an indigenous ethnic minority in China. In 1943, Xiao Shuming, then a ...

The Sisters of Ladakh
Ricardo Lobo
2003, 50 min., Color, US
THE SISTERS OF LADAKH is an inquiry into the feminine vision of Buddhism. Filmed on location in Ladakh, on the Himalayan border between India and Tibet, this one hour documentary features stunning pho...

Sky-blue Hometown
Soh-Young Kim
2000, 93 min., Color, Korea
This documentary traces the trajectory of a Korean diasporic community in the former Soviet Union. Placed in internment camps by Stalin during World War II, the plight of a generation of Korean-Russia...

Struggle For Life
National Liberation Front Vietnam
Producer: National Liberation Front Vietnam
1968, 30 min., BW, Vietnam
This film depicts Vietnamese medical cadres working to save the lives of people in the liberated areas of South Vietnam during the war. At the front, medics carry the wounded to carefully concealed tu...

Student Movement in Indonesia: 15 Years Later
Tino Saroengallo
2013, 93 min., Color, Indonesia
In May 1998, the student movement in Indonesia, a popular movement denouncing the collapse of the Indonesian economy and demanding the end of President Suharto's authoritarian regime, accomplished the...

Tapestry: Asian Women in America (a.k.a. Tapestry II)
Organization of Asian Women
Producer: Organization of Asian Women
1991, 55 min., Color, US
Through archival photographs, oral histories and folk songs by Nobuko Miyamoto, this video weaves the history of 200 years of Asian women's experiences. It begins with early Asian immigration to the U...

Toc Storee
Ming-Yuen S. Ma
1993, 21 min., Color, US
The first in a series by the artist addressing Asian/Pacific Islander Gay experiences, this multilevel narrative explores sexuality, identity, tradition and personal recollection through gay Asian sto...

Tongues of Heaven
Anita Chang, An-Chi Chen, Leivallyn Kainoa Kaupu, Monica Hau‘oli Waiau & Shin-Lan Yu
2013, 60 min., Color, US/Taiwan
Set in Taiwan and Hawai‘i, territories where the Austronesian family languages are spoken, TONGUES OF HEAVEN focuses on the questions, desires and challenges of young indigenous peoples to learn the l...

Turmeric Border-Marks
Christina Choe
2000, 25 min., Color
TURMERIC BORDER-MARKS is an experimental documentary set in modern Seoul, Korea, where an intersection becomes two stories of migration, globalization, hybrid identity, cracked mirrors and turmeric (a...

Two Months to Home
Janice Ahn
2006, 8 min., Color, US
In the months prior to 9-11, an Afghan woman named Samira Rahman narrowly escapes from the Taliban, losing her family. After settling down in Long Island and beginning a new family, Samira is taken aw...

U.S. Techniques of Genocide in Vietnam
Vietnamese People's Army Film
Producer: Vietnamese People's Army Film, Democratic Republic of Vietnam
1968, 35 min., BW, Vietnam
This film describes the use of elaborate U.S. weapons against civilian targets in Vietnam such as anti-personnel weapons designed to kill human targets while causing minimal damage to buildings, steel...

Umbilical Cord
Angel Velasco Shaw
1998, 28 min., Color, Phillippines
A kaleidoscope of the filmmaker's impressions of current events from the Centennial commemoration to recent elections and their relationship to the past one hundred years of Philippine struggle. In a ...

Variety Survival Talkshow
Se Young JO
2009, 72 min., Color, South Korea
“I was about six. Back then I didn't know what it was or what it was called, so I couldn't tell anyone. But even after I knew what it was, I still couldn't speak out.” --KangYoung, Korean performance ...

War for Guam
Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Producer: Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Baltazar B. Aguon, Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Cristine Borja Sumbi, Beni Matías
2015, 57 min., Color, US
WAR FOR GUAM is a 57-minute film about World War II and its enduring legacy in Guam, a U.S. territory since 1898. The film tells the extraordinary story of how the Native people of Guam, the Chamorros...

War in Daechuri
Jeong II Geon
Producer: PURN Productions
2006, 45 min., South Korea
Spurred by the US government's plan to expand military bases in Pyeongtaek city, a war is being waged against the farmers of the South Korean village of Daechuri. In this joint effort by the South Ko...

Who Gives Kisses Freely From Her Lips
Simin Farkhondeh
2009, 41 min., Color, US/Iran
Inspired by the work of Sara Gomez and Cuban Imperfect Cinema, Who Gives Kisses Freely From Her Lips, weaves together fiction and documentary to tell the story of a filmmaker determined to make a film...

Will Be Televised
Shu Lea Cheang
1991, 300 min., Color
As video camcorders become more widely distributed in Asia, video makers have become active protagonists in the social and political changes taking place in the region. This series of tapes from five ...

Women of Telecommunications Station #6
Vietnamese People's Army Films
Producer: Vietnamese People's Army Films
1969, 20 min., BW, Vietnam
Throughout the Vietnam war, young North Vietnamese women learned skills which enabled them to take an active part in diverse aspects of the armed struggle. In this film, they operate a vital communica...

The Women Outside: Korean Women and the U.S. Military
J.T. Takagi & Hye Jung Park
Producer: Third World Newsreel
1995, 60 min., Color, US/South Korea
Documenting the lives of women who work in the South Korean military brothels and clubs where over 27,000 women "service" the 37,000 American soldiers stationed in the most militarized region of the w...

Young Puppeteers of Vietnam
Democratic Republic of Vietnam
Producer: Democratic Peoples' Republic of Viet Nam
1969, 25 min., BW, Vietnam
Art, dance, music and poetry became a vital necessity for the liberated areas of South Vietnam in their daily efforts to survive the bombings and napalming of the Vietnam War. In this moving film, tee...


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