Recent Praise for Hard Choices

Capital in its many facets is variable.  Like quicksilver, it can divide, reunite, and metamorphose seamlessly across a spectrum of ownerships by foreigners, the state, and domestic private
entrepreneurs.  

What does variable capital mean in and for Vietnam?  Who are the different investors?  How do they respond to state efforts to attract investments from overseas Vietnamese?  How do global supply chains—corporate buyers, contract factories, and subcontractors—shape the changing nature and impacts of capital in Vietnam?  How does a self-described socialist state use policies on investment, employment, and the privatization of state-owned factories to control the relations between workers and owners?  What roles in this mix are played by journalists who can ignore neither the party line nor the workers who protest in spite of it?  

In addition to addressing these questions, Prof. Tran will argue that workers in Vietnam are not resigned to being squeezed between morphing capital and state control.  They defend their interests flexibly in diverse forms of protest, overt and covert, including appeals to the state’s own socialist vision.  Fresh from extensive fieldwork in labor-intensive industries such as textiles, garments, and footwear, Prof. Tran will show how Vietnamese workers use origin, class, gender, and ethnicity to mobilize collective action against morphing capital in a one-party state.

Angie Ngoc Tran is a professor of political economy at California State University, Monterey Bay.  Her latest publications include articles in the Labor Studies Journal (2007) on labor media and labor-management-state relations in Vietnam.  Her PhD is from the University of Southern California (1996).

This event - the final in a series of 4 film screening which will be followed by a discussion with director Clint Eastwood - is part of the second phase of a three year research effort to compare the formation of the divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. We will conduct a comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects focusing roughly on the period from 1931-1951.

Letters From Iwo Jima Synopsis

Sixty-one years ago, US and Japanese armies met on Iwo Jima. Decades later, several hundred letters are unearthed from that stark island's soil. The letters give faces and voices to the men who fought there, as well as the extraordinary general who led them.

The Japanese soldiers are sent to Iwo Jima knowing that in all probability they will not come back. Among them are Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a baker who wants only to live to see the face of his newborn daughter; Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an Olympic equestrian champion known around the world for his skill and his honor; Shimizu (Ryo Kase), a young former military policeman whose idealism has not yet been tested by war; and Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura), a strict military man who would rather accept suicide than surrender.

Leading the defense is Lt. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), whose travels in America have revealed to him the hopeless nature of the war but also given him strategic insight into how to take on the vast American armada streaming in from across the Pacific.

With little defense other than sheer will and the volcanic rock of the island itself, Gen. Kuribayashi's unprecedented tactics transform what was predicted to be a quick and bloody defeat into nearly 40 days of heroic and resourceful combat.

Almost 7,000 American soldiers were killed on Iwo Jima; more than 20,000 Japanese troops perished. The black sands of Iwo Jima are stained with their blood, but their sacrifices, their struggles, their courage and their compassion live on in the letters they sent home.

This is the second phase of a three year research effort to compare the formation of the divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.  We will conduct a comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects focusing roughly on the period from 1931-1951.

This is the third in a series of 4 film screening which will be followed by a discussion of the audience.

Yamato Synopsis

During late World War II, the Japanese army starts loosing the battle.  Special junior officers including Kamio (Kenichi Matsuyama) board Yamato and meet officer Moriwaki (Takashi Sorimachi) and Uchia (Shidou Nakamura).  However, this battle marks the virtual end of the combined fleet of the ikmperial Japanese Navy.  Then in April 1945. Yamato is ordered to carry out a suicide mission and sets out tot he waters of Okinawa...

This is the second phase of a three year research effort to compare the formation of the divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.  We will conduct a comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects focusing roughly on the period from 1931-1951.

This is the first in a series of 4 film screening which will be followed by a discussion of the audience.

Devils on the Doorstep synopsis

Renowned actor Jiang Wen directs this sweeping look at a small Chinese village located near the Great Wall during the closing days of WWII. As Japanese soldiers march up and down the village's main thoroughfare, Ma Dasan (Wen) is making love with his widowed lover Yu'er (Jiang Hongbo). Suddenly, there is a knock at the door and a gun at Ma's head. He is informed that for the next week he is to house two gagged and bound prisoners, one a fanatical Japanese soldier, the other a Chinese translator -- and to interrogate the pair. The village elders uneasily question the two, while the translator intentionally mistranslates the epithets and insults from the soldier. When the Chinese resistance fighters do not return to pick up the prisoners, the villagers panic and order Ma to execute them. Ma, in turn, panics and tries to hide the cantankerous duo in the Great Wall -- that is until the villagers discover his ruse and almost lynch him, despite a strongly worded defense by Yu'er. Six months later, the villagers become increasingly worried about boarding these prisoners, lest they all be branded collaborators. This film won the prestigious Grand Prix at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.

This is the second phase of a three year research effort to compare the formation of the divided memories in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States.  We will conduct a comparative study of popular cinema dealing with historical subjects focusing roughly on the period from 1931-1951.

This is the second in a series of 4 film screening which will be followed by a discussion of the audience.

Blue Swallow synopsis

An aspiring Japanese aviator longing to take flight from Japanese-occupied Korea enrolls in Tachikawa Flight Academy in director Yoon Jong-chan's lavish look at the life of pre-World War II aviatrix Park Gyeong-weon. Raised in the Korean countryside but longing to embrace her Korean heritage, Park Gyeong-weon (Jang Jin-yeong) longs to take to the sky "like a swallow." Park is convinced that she has what it takes to soar through the clouds, and in 1925 she begins to pursue her dreams by enrolling in the Tachikawa Flight Academy. An amiable cab driver by day, the tomboyish aeronaut eventually strikes up a close friendship with fellow Koreans Kang Se-gi (Kim Tae-hyeok) and Lee Jeong-heui (Han ji-men) while entering into a tenuous romance with handsome student Han Ji-hyeok (Kim Ju-hyeok). High up in the sky Park attempt to hold her own against airborne Nipponese nemesis Masako Gibe (Yuko Fueki), and as tensions begin to heat up between Japan and Korea the skillful pilot plans a high-profile "friendship" flight to Manchuria in hopes of encouraging peaceful relations between the two countries. - Jason Buchanan,