Film: AsiaLENS - "Those 4 Years"

• Event Date: Monday, October 19, 2026
• Time: 6:00 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free

• Film

Presented by the Center for East Asian & Pacifics Studies, join us for a free screening of "Those 4 Years" (2021) followed by a Q&A with professor & filmmaker Joe Karackattu.

Synopsis

The film is an amazing journey into the lives of those Chinese who came to India around the middle of the 19th century… speaking a language unknown to their neighbours when they first arrived. It journeys across three countries and reams of colonial office records to retrace the places those people came from, the means and mode of their arrival, and how many of them ended up making India their home. It is a history of people, plants and places - as it catalogues their contributions to plantations, locates places and sites associated with their earliest arrival and stay and, more remarkably, manages to locate some of the descendants of those Chinese who arrived in India over 150 years ago. The film is based on fieldwork in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Southern India. It has been screened in the United States (Penn State University, University of Pittsburgh, New School), The United Kingdom ( King's College, SOAS University of London), UAE, Qatar, China (Tsinghua University, Beijing Foreign Studies University), Malaysia (Universiti Malaya) and across India.

Run time is 52 minutes.