Education About Asia: Online Archives

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Teaching Resources Essay

Independent Cinema as a Lens on a Changing Cambodia: Using the Films of Anti-Archive in the Classroom

by Lauren Collins

Often teaching about Cambodia focuses on two key historical events: the Kingdom of Angkor of the ninth to fifteenth centuries and the Khmer Rouge Genocide of 1975–1979. For students in my undergraduate classrooms, when I ask what they know about Cambodia, if they have any baseline knowledge at all, discussion of the country is generally synonymous with Pol Pot and the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.

Feature Article

The Act of Constructing Memory at Cambodia’s Bophana Center

by Jackson Brook

In a quiet Cambodian village in the province of Battambang, Heng Kuylang hacks a long bamboo sapling with a machete while reflecting on her decades of marriage to a man she has never loved. Like countless Cambodians who came of age between 1975 and 1979, Heng and her husband were forced to marry each other under Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, a violent and dystopian attempt to end capitalism and rebuild a new society free of Western influences. Approximately one in four Cambodians die...

Feature Article

The Essentials: Seven Samurai

by Yasuko Sato

Kurosawa Akira’s Seven Samurai is a timeless masterpiece that has been widely recognized as the greatest foreign-language film ever made. The plot concerns a humble village hiring a band of samurai and protecting itself from pillage in war-ravaged sixteenth-century Japan. Since the wretchedness inflicted on the peasantry is evocative of all forms of human suffering, the honorable service conducted by the seven samurai takes on universal significance.

Feature Article

Sri Lanka in the Classroom

by EAA Editorial Office

Editor’s Introduction: A Virgin Vote, a short film by director Udan Fernando, follows a Sri Lankan citizen voting for the first time in the country’s 2020 parliamentary elections after becoming stranded due to Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 lockdown. In the essay and short interview that follow, Fernando discusses A Virgin Vote and its production, as well as the ongoing political crisis in Sri Lanka. The basic information below provides context for readers unfamiliar with Sri Lanka and the...

Feature Article

The Essentials: Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land

by Carol Stepanchuk, Liangyu Fu

Stan Lai (Lai Shengchuan) is one of the most celebrated playwrights working in the Chinese-speaking world. His work over three decades has charted the course of modern Chinese-language theatre in Taiwan, China, and other Chinese-speaking regions.

Feature Article

Revisiting Live Your Dream and Cocktail Party

by Regge Life

Regge Life is the founder of Global Film Network Inc. Early in his career, Life worked as an American Film Institute intern on John Landis’s Trading Places. He went on to direct episodes of Sesame Street, The Cosby Show, A Different World, and Sister, Sister. He is Executive Producer/Director for documentaries such as Doubles, After America . . . After Japan, Live Your Dream: The Taylor Anderson Story, and Cocktail Party. He produced his first work in Japan, Struggle and Success: The...

Feature Article

Teaching Cambodian Genocide Through Film

by Benjamin Harris

Students in my world history class sat in silence as the film credits started to roll. We had just started a unit on the Cold War, and I decided to integrate the film First They Killed My Father about genocide in Cambodia.1 Directed by Angelina Jolie (who spent time working in Cambodia to film the popular Tomb Raider movies and has been a Cambodian citizen for a decade) and produced by Jolie and Cambodian director Rithy Panh for Netflix, my hope was that the story of five-year-old Loung (played ...

Feature Article

One Day in the Life of a North Korean Textile Worker

by Michael J. Seth

There are many films on North Korea; some are quite good. But Pieter Fleury’s North Korea: A Day in the Life is in a category by itself. In 2004, the Dutch independent filmmaker was granted rare permission to film everyday life in the closed, secretive country. No foreigners are allowed to wander at will in North Korea; all are carefully shepherded and watched, allowed to visit and film only what their hosts decide. These tend to be the same places: a visit to a model kindergarten, to the grea...

Columns, Film Review Essay

The Little Girl of Hanoi (Em Bé Hà Nội)

by Margaret B. Bodemer

When American students learn about the Socialist Republic of Việt Nam (SRV), it is typically in the context of what Americans call the Việt Nam War but that is known in the SRV as the American War. Courses that address this conflict tend to emphasize American over Vietnamese experiences.1 This review forwards The Little Girl of Hanoi (Em Bé Hà Nội) as an engaging course viewing that offers an important and alternative window into Vietnamese war experiences. Director Hải Ninh re...

Columns, Film Review Essay

Have You Seen This Man?

by Paul Bach Jr.

The acknowledged first recorded film made in China is The Battle of Dingjunshan by Ren Qingtai from 1905. As such, the China National Film Museum in Beijing has on exhibit signage that notes this acknowledgment, along with the recreation of the filming. However, there are a number of Chinese film scholars who have their doubts about whether it was ever actually made. Mention is made in a July 1904 article in the professional magician’s journal Mahatma on the Chinese magician C...

Online Supplement

Make Your Documentary! A Call to Action

by Jeffrey A. Dym

In 2008, I responded to a call in Education About Asia for Digital Asia: Documentary Digital Video Workshop, a two-day workshop sponsored by Asia Educational Media Service (AEMS) at the University of Illinois to introduce participants to the various aspects of filmmaking. Being one of roughly twelve participants selected from a pool of about forty applicants, changed the direction of my career. Prior to the workshop, I had watched hundreds of videos for material to use in my...

Feature Article

Why I Made a Virgin Vote

by Udan Fernando

It all began with a very long conversation I had with a person. He became both the subject and protagonist of what later became a short English-language film, A Virgin Vote, released in September 2021 in Colombo and online. The conversant was a childhood and teenage classmate in Sri Lanka. Our conversation took place in a bar/restaurant in July 2020, literally a stone’s throw away from the school we attended. I had just returned from Singapore, where I was located for about three months during...

Columns, Film Review Essay

Day of the Western Sunrise

by Angie Stokes, Keith Reimink

Day of the Western Sunrise is a Japanese-language, English-subtitled, animated documentary film that follows three surviving crew members of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5). On March 1, 1954, this small wooden Japanese tuna fishing vessel was exposed to the United States’ Castle Bravo thermonuclear test near the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, where it stood eighty-five miles away from the epicenter of the blast. Because pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had circulated widely in news...

Feature Article

New Online Teaching Resources for Early Chinese Cinema

by Christopher Rea

The Chinese Film Classics Project is a research, teaching, and translation initiative aimed at making early Chinese cinema more accessible to the general public. The centerpieces of the project are two interlinked web resources: (1) the website chinesefilmclassics.org and (2) the YouTube channel Modern Chinese Cultural Studies (https://tinyurl.com/4zk6wevb). These sites currently feature twenty-four Chinese films released between 1922 and 1949 with complete English subtitles; over 150 film clips...

Feature Article

A Brief Interview with Udan Fernando

by Lucien Ellington, Udan Fernando

Udan Fernando obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam. He currently functions as an Independent Researcher from Sri Lanka and Singapore. Until March 2020, he was Executive Director of the Center for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), a Sri Lankan think-tank. Throughout his career, as Head of the Development Commission of the National Christian Council of Sri Lanka (1989–1995), Executive Director of Paltra (gte) Ltd (1996–2001), Guest Researcher at University of Amsterdam (2002–20...

Feature Article

Using Victory in the Pacific in High School and College History Survey Courses

by Aaron Pickering

Despite its age, Victory in the Pacific is an ideal tool for instructors hoping to expose their students to the lesser-known elements of World War II in the Pacific. Its highly episodic organization makes it very easy to pick and choose individual segments without creating continuity issues. These segments, particularly given the eyewitness accounts, can serve as outstanding supplements to other lesson activities and instruction. While there are undoubtedly newer and flashier documentaries an...

Feature Article

The Essentials: How the Film Tora! Tora! Tora! May Be Utilized as a Teaching Tool About Pearl Harbor

by Daniel A. Métraux

The use of film in a history class can be an important learning tool for students. The traditional method of instruction based on pure lecturing can inform students of the basic facts, but the use of film can substantially enhance the learning experience. When I was a Professor of Asian Studies at a small women’s college in Virginia, I often used films as a way of enhancing my lectures. When teaching about modern Chinese history and culture, I would show such movies as Raise the Red Lantern (1...

Teaching Resources Essay

Teaching Kashmir through Documentary Films

by Abir Bazaz

The Kashmir dispute—one of the most intransigent political conflicts in Asia—has its beginnings in the end of British colonial rule over India and the subsequent Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, which left the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir divided into an Indian-administered region and a Pakistani-administered region.1 Some argue that the crisis has its origins in the British sale of Kashmir to Maharaja Gulab Singh in 1846 and the establishment of a feudatory Dogra state u...

Teaching Resources Essay

Under the Dome

by Andrew M. McGreevy

Under the Dome was first shown in China on February 28, 2015 The documentary is now included in the Global Environmental Justice Documentaries Project, which is based in the USA and Canada and supported by the International Documentary Association. The title of the documentary was taken from the book Under the Dome, written by Stephen King and published in 2009. (The documentary is about China; the book is about the USA.) The documentary is also available online.

Teaching Resources Essay

Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness

by Franklin D. Rausch

Final Straw: Food, Earth, Happiness (seventy minutes), directed by Suhee Kang and Patrick Lydon, is an exploration of the natural farming movement conducted primarily through interviews with practitioners based in Japan, Korea, and the United States. The late Larry Korn, translator of Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution (first published in 1975), the germ of this manifestation of the movement, is featured throughout, his explanations of the principles of natural farming providing struc...

New to EAA?

Before viewing the full archives, view Editor’s Choice Articles, handpicked by EAA Editor, Lucien Ellington, which provide a good overview of EAA and introduction for new readers.