Rome International Film Festival 2008

The Siamese Connection is a feature-length documentary that explores the living history of Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins from Thailand, who settled in the North Carolina foothills during the Antebellum South, married two local sisters and raised 21 children. Using a collage of scenes from Thailand to Mount Airy, NC, we discover that these men still exist vividly in the contemporary imagination and have the power to act as potent metaphors for basic human experiences in both life and art. As their history unfolds through document, lyrical reenactments and artists' depictions, we uncover Chang and Eng's immense legacy through the course of the Bunker family reunion and explore this startling portrait of race, sexual taboo and body politics that defies popular preconceptions about 19th century rural southern life. Evidence of Chang and Eng's relations with the local citizens, their own wives, and their many slaves greatly challenge widely-held notions of Southern racial inequality and aversion to physical 'otherness'. Physical dissimilarity has long provoked wonder in fellow human beings. From prehistoric icons to modern tabloids, the exceptional body has excited both reverence and repulsion. Even as the positioning of the 'other' emerges from culture-bound expectations, it also violates them, allowing history to continuously reinvent its monsters, gods and slaves. It is from this flux of history that we gather our facts and dream our fictions. The Siamese Connection perches picariously on the grey area between history and mythology and utilizes a method of resolution that rests somewhere in between.