Showing 1-10 of 134 results
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Avoiding bogeymen and the religious police
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/10/2016
» Tehran in the 1980s, at the height of the Iran-Iraq War and a few years after the Islamic Revolution convulses the life of Iranians. In a middle-class apartment, young mother Shideh lives with her husband, a medical doctor, and their daughter Dorsa. Their lives are punctuated by the sound of sirens and shelling, their windows taped up to shield vibrations. One day, the father is drafted to fight in the escalating war, and Shideh is left with Dorsa in the house where strange beings lurk. The neighbours begin to talk about djinn, the devilish beings in the Middle Eastern belief, and soon Dorsa's doll goes missing and the girl begins to talk to invisible people.
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Deep in the paradox
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/05/2022
» In Cairo, a religious student at the prestigious Al-Azhar Islamic University is recruited by secret police to infiltrate a Muslim Brotherhood cell. In Mashad, a holy city in Iran, a serial killer prowls a seedy suburb and strangles head-scarfed prostitutes. In the first film, bloodlust officials torture dissidents with abandon. In the second film, religion is evoked and the name of God is cited as a justification for murder. This begs the obvious question: Will Boy From Heaven be banned in Egypt, and Holy Spider Iran?
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10 films to watch out for
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2023
» A fierce hijab girl, a Vietnamese pilgrimage, a Scorsese-DiCaprio team up and a new Cate Blanchett drama, Cannes Film Festival opens today with an eclectic taste of world cinema.
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The vagabond returns
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2023
» A film once overlooked and misunderstood may have found its moment many years later, the work's peculiar vibrations finally detected and at last appreciated.
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Pandemonium
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/09/2022
» The first shot of Athena will be discussed in every writing about the film. A bravura choreography of movement that begins with an intimate close-up of a face and ends, after 10 blood-rushing minutes, with an explosion of revolutionary rage -- a la Les Miserables and Do You Hear The People Sing? transported to a predominantly-Muslim Paris suburb -- that opening shot is so hypnotising and immersive in its non-stop kineticism that we're led to forgive that it's also an earnest show-off, a proud enshrinement of style and attitude over everything else. Romain Gavras, a filmmaker known for making music videos for Jay Z and M.I.A, will cement that approach with many similar shots throughout the film -- long, seemingly uninterrupted shots with parkour camerawork full of angry bodies -- more than enough for aspiring filmmakers of the world to slobber over.
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First they came for those who 'twerk'
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/06/2017
» The police this week visited several cultural spaces, to appreciate the art and to mete out censorship. Next they'll give out art prizes -- to those who toe the line and serve the official ideology -- like the propagandistic communist states did in the last century.
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The inciting incident
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/10/2017
» On Sept 24, 1976, two electricians were beaten and hanged to death from the top of a gate somewhere in Nakhon Pathom, victims of an escalating right-wing terror in Thai politics of that heady decade. Two weeks later, as protests against the return to the Kingdom of former dictator Gen Thanom Kittikajorn gathered steam, students at Thammasat University staged a play about the hanging of the two men. Soon the photographs of the play were used by nationalists to whip up anger and fear of communism, which led to the massacre on the morning of Oct 6 as police and militias laid siege to the university, killing, maiming and brutalising scores of people in one of the worst incidents of bloodshed in modern Thai history.
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The next step in evolution
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/05/2022
» The maestro is teasing us, with his favourite instrument: the scalpel. Mechanical, electrified scalpels that split open the flesh -- often, the belly -- like a bulging purse being unzipped. This time, what comes out of the belly is a menagerie of grotesque organs -- organs with neither names nor functions, grown inside the body primed for involuntary evolution.
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Massacre's memory
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/07/2017
» The noblest thing is to remember the dead, no matter how long it has been. In the documentary Respectfully Yours, friends and families of some of the victims of the Oct 6, 1976, massacre remember those who were brutally maimed, tortured and killed on the grounds of Thammasat University 41 years ago, as the police and right-wing militia laid siege.
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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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