The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand

This event is part of the “Taiwan Documentary Film Festival in Thailand 2024,” sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan and the Taipei Economic and Culture Office in Thailand. There will be a Q&A session with the director after the film screening.

'Absent without Leave' director, Lau Kek huat, is from Perak, Malaysia and received his bachelor's degree and master's degree in Taiwan’s NTUA Department of Motion Picture. Lau is a Taiwan citizen now.
The film begins with a picture that has been on the wall for more than 30 years in the director’s family home in Perak, Malaysia. The people in it sacrificed their lives fighting for independence, but their stories have remained untold for 60 years.
It is a long-standing taboo in the director’s family not to talk about one of the men in the picture -- to the extent that even bringing up his name and his past creates disdain among the director’s older relatives.
Eventually, the director finds out that his grandfather died fighting for Malaysia’s independence, but his comrades’ stories are excluded from Malaysian history. This documentary set out to unveil these mysteries.

In 'The Politics of Coercion,' Neil Loughlin explains the persistence of Cambodia’s authoritarian regime for more than four decades. The book provides a historically grounded investigation of the country's ruling coalition: political elites, many drawn from within the state's coercive apparatus, who, in coordination with state-dependent tycoons, have come to control Cambodia's politics and economy. Loughlin presents new empirical data revealing the coercive underpinnings of the modern Cambodian state and its party, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP).

The focus on coercion reflects the regime's conflict, post-conflict evolution and extractive political economy, as the ruling coalition failed to channel popular interests through its political institutions. Thus, it resorts either to low-intensity forms of coercion, such as intimidation and surveillance, or to high-intensity coercion, such as violent crackdowns and extrajudicial killings.
Through a critical reevaluation of the regime's origins and evolution in its relationship with citizens, 'The Politics of Coercion' reconceptualizes the CPP to emphasize the obstacles -- structural, institutional and distributional -- to building a mass-based clientelist or developmentally legitimate authoritarian party.
Dr Neil Loughlin is a senior lecturer (associate professor) in comparative politics at City St George's, University of London. Neil’s research focuses on comparative authoritarian politics and the political economy of development, with an emphasis on Southeast Asia.

The United Nations General Assembly has designated 25 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women to raise awareness about all forms of violence against women.