Wednesday, 31 October 2007
6:30 p.m. – Korean Studies Auditorium

Twelve-year-old Chatree is miserable and lonely after his transfer to an all-boys boarding school. His teacher does little to make him feel welcome and his peers bully him with tales of drowned boys and hanged girls. Chatree begins to feel his life is cursed until he meets and befriends a fellow student, who happens to harbor a curious secret. Dark and terrifying lessons are about to be learned in this school’s dorm and innocence will be lost forever. Dorm won the Glass Bear for Best Feature Film at the Kinderfest at the Berlin Film Festival.

Review

Friday, 26 October 2007 at 12:00 PM
Presented by Professor Kenneth R. Hall, Ball State University

Ken Hall has published extensively on early South and Southeast Asian history, including Civilizations of Asia and the Pacific, The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft, Trade and Statecraft in the Age of the Colas, Maritime Trade and State Development in East Southeast Asia, An Economic History of Early Southeast Asia, Structural Change in Early South India, Maritime Diasporas in the Indian Ocean and East and Southeast Asia (960-1775), and Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400-1800. He is currently preparing a contracted book on Maritime Trade in the Indian Ocean, 100-1500 C.E. During 2003-2004 he served as a senior Fulbright Scholar at Gajah Mada University in Indonesia, facilitating Muslim-Christian community dialogue, and continues as a Fulbright Senior Specialist for special assignments by the United States Department of State.

Wednesday, 17 October 2007
6:30 p.m. – Korean Studies Auditorium

A meditation on absence and longing, 4:30 is about a moment, and a boy’s attempt to cling to it, escaping his drab reality. 4:30 traces the relationship between Zhang Xiao Wu and his tenant Jung, a thirty-something Korean man. Told entirely from the perspective of the boy, this story of two very different characters is less about friendship than about a shared experience and appreciation of solitude. 4:30 screened at the Berlin Film Festival and the Deauville Film Festival and won the Asian film critic’s NETPAC Award at the 2006 Hawaii International Film Festival.

Official Website | Director’s Website | Interview

Wednesday, 10 October 2007
6:30 p.m. – Korean Studies Auditorium

Indonesia, 2006 (120 minutes)
Director: Richard Oh
Indonesian with English Subtitles

A lowly clerk working in the archives section of a big bureaucratic organisation chances upon a suitcase and finds his life completely transformed. From their neighbour, he and his wife soon find out that a man robbed a bank and fled with a suitcase filled with a billion rupiah. Is this the same suitcase that the clerk came upon? Filled with dread, he is torn between paying his debts by taking the money in the suitcase or to sell off his beloved P. Ramlee record collection. – Singapore International Film Festival

Official Website | Director’s Website

Wednesday, 3 October
6:30 p.m. – Korean Studies Auditorium

Four worldly women put their gaydar to the test in this over-the-top comedy from Thailand.

Pang (Meesuke Jangmeesuke) is an attractive but slightly naïve woman who lives in Bangkok and regularly lunches with her four best friends — Pom (Patcharasri Benjamas), a brash and man-hungry fashion journalist; Fai (Pimonwan Suphayang), a hair stylist with passion for bargains; Pat (Kulnadda Pajchimsawat), a press agent with a boyfriend quite a bit older than herself; and Nim (Ornpriya Hunsat), who sells aphrodisiac medicines over the phone. One day Pang announces with great excitement that she’s engaged to be married, and her friends are eager to meet her future husband, but when they’re introduced to Kong (Thienchai Jayavasti), her smart-suited, impeccably-styled and well-mannered fiancé, they all come to the same conclusion — he must be gay. Determined to prevent Pang from having her heart broken, the gals set out to dig up the truth about Kong with the help of Brother Bee (Michael Shaowannasi), an airline steward who makes no secret of his alternative lifestyle. But it doesn’t take long for Pang’s pals to discover proving Kong is gay is hardly as easy as they imagined.

METROSEXUAL was directed by Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, who previously enjoyed great success in Thailand with the broad comedy THE IRON LADIES.

Friday, 5 October 2007 at 12:00 PM
Presented by Professor John Hartmann, Presidential Teaching Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Northern Illinois University

The early Tai were among the first people to develop a system of irrigated rice production employing
an array of skillfully engineered ditches (meuang) and dikes (fai) to channel water from the streams
and rivers of the intermountain valleys of southern China that they inhabited. The development of this
technology and culture, organized around manpower for construction and maintenance of the system,
can be reconstructed using comparative-historical linguistics and further analyzed and illustrated using
GIS. Some scholars place the historical origins of Tai irrigated rice culture as somewhere in Yunnan
Province in southwestern China.

The data presented in this study, while not exhaustive, points roughly to origins in the regions of
Guangxi that border northern Vietnam at the time of proto-Tai some 2,000 years ago. One can easily
explain the expansion of the Tai in terms of their ability as food producers coupled with their skill in
organizing manpower derived from the need to build and maintain irrigation systems. The early Tai
found themselves in an environment that readily leant itself to reliable meuang-fai technology in
contrast to the baray system of the Khmer, which was much more subject to the vagaries of nature and
based on a different social system.

Dr. John Hartmann is a Professor of Thai Languages and Literatures at Northern Illinois University
(NIU) and was named a Distinguished Teaching Professor in 2006. Dr. Hartmann was the Acting Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, NIU, in 1987 and 1990. He was also the Language Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, NIU, from 1986 to 1987. Dr. Hartmann received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan.