Showing 1-10 of 21 results
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A copy of his mind
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/04/2016
» In the Indonesian film A Copy Of My Mind, a pirate DVD seller falls in love with a salon worker. Two working-class lovers struggling in a vast city, their relationship is just as heated as the smoke-choking street of Jakarta, and around them looms the tense shadow of politics as a presidential election nears.
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Come and see (no need to pray)
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/04/2021
» In an ordinary democracy, a film like Ehipassiko (in English, Come And See) shouldn't have had the least bit of worry about the possibility of being banned. The subject itself initially provoked the censors' impulse: this is a finely-tuned, patiently observed documentary about the controversial Wat Dhammakaya and the dramatic 2017 siege of the temple.
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Eyes wide open
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/05/2020
» The literature about modern Thai politics is not abundant, and by this I mean a narrative that grounds its characters in the double-whammy of coup d'etat and street protest that characterised the mid-2000s to mid-2010s. The period, plus a few years earlier when Thaksin Shinawatra rose to power, contains some of the most convulsive and era-defining moments that continue to shape the visible and invisible dimensions of Thai society in the present time, and it's astonishing that not more writers find it a rich wellspring of artistic expression (on the contrary, visual artists and theatre artists seem more responsive to the political currents of the same period).
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Asean on screen
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/09/2020
» Ahead of the BAFF featuring Southeast Asian movies plus Chinese and Japanese titles, Life spoke with two filmmakers about their work
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Sucking the wind out of the elections
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/05/2018
» The verb of the week is "to dood".
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Prayut can't control lens of history
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/04/2018
» He came to drain the swamp, but the swamp has reclaimed him. He came to purge politicians, but politicians have found him. He came to rewrite history, and we wonder how history will remember him.
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Thai idols fall in line with orthodoxy
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/09/2018
» Poor coup-makers, no one wants to see them on TV. At 6pm sharp when the theme song begins, there's a rush of hands to the remote control. Not that you can escape them. The true mark of dictatorship is audiovisual dictatorship: They beam their images on every TV and radio channel, monopolising your sensory reception, like a sci-fi movie, or like a spoiled child demanding your full attention. At 6pm every day for the past four years, the hands clutching the remote have reached for the only possible button. Off.
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Knives are out in death penalty row
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/06/2018
» To execute or not to execute, the question weighed on Thai society in the past week with the force of righteous anger. It is a tough question, one that lays bare the complex intersection of morality, law, religion, belief, value, and even the position of the country on the spectrum along which the international norm is moving.
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A surprise behind the door
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/03/2018
» The house sits deep in the woods, near a cemetery staked with tombstones. The family consists of a father, reeling in debt, and his four children, the eldest 22 and the youngest six. The mother is ill, ashen-faced, bedridden, and she'll jingle the brass bell in her hand to summon help. That jingling bell, and the apparition of a woman in a white gown in the mother's gloomy bedroom, will signal the cue of many jump-scares in the tale that unfolds.
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'Pre-truth' far scarier than 'post-truth'
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/11/2016
» 'Post-truth" -- that's Oxford Dictionaries' word of 2016. Trump-inspired and aided by Facebook algorithms, it clicks. What happens isn't as important as what you think happens, and if you think something is true, then what is true is simply what you think. But truth be told, post-truth still suggests an involvement of truth, how truth is there and yet is blithely bypassed by emotion and prejudice, and thus there's a more dangerous term that fits better in some places: "pre-truth".
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