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  • LIFE

    Doc lovers rejoice!

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/03/2016

    » It is high time for audiences who appreciate the rough-edged reality of documentary films. Of the five nominees of the Oscar for best documentary feature, three had a regular release in Bangkok cinemas (Amy, Cartel Land, The Look of Silence), something unthinkable a few years ago when no distributor wanted to risk showing non-fiction films in cinemas. Now there is almost always at least one documentary film at SF CentralWorld, with the initiation of the independent outfit Documentary Club (in the programme now is The Hunting Ground, about rape crimes in American universities).

  • LIFE

    Guilt and sin minus the politics

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/04/2018

    » The squalor of Manila slums populated by high-school drug runners, then a chaotic precinct ruled by corrupt cops and even more corrupt chiefs -- these are the familiar turfs of Brillante Mendoza, the best-known Filipino filmmaker among international audiences.

  • LIFE

    Asean Film Festival is finally here

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/03/2024

    » Despite the odd, unexplained double postponement -- the first when it was moved from early December 2023 to late January 2024, and then from January to March -- the Bangkok Asean Film Festival finally gets under way, from today until Sunday at SF CentralWorld. Despite the adjournment, the line-up looks decent, with the best Southeast Asian titles culled from the past year -- Tiger Stripes, Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell, Abang Adik, Dreaming And Dying, Oasis Of Now, Nowhere Near, Morrison, Thai classics The Adventure Of Sudsakorn and The Adulterer, and a short film competition.

  • LIFE

    The afterlife of Mitr Chaibancha

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/10/2023

    » In an abrupt moment of life's brutal script, Mitr Chaibancha fell to his death from a helicopter ladder on Oct 8, 1970. He was filming Insee Thong (Golden Eagle), playing an anti-communist masked hero, when he slipped from the rung and plunged to the ground in Pattaya. That same evening, his body was transported to Wat Kae Nang Loeng. Thousands of people, unable to believe that Thailand's most famous actor was really, tragically dead, amassed impromptu at the temple and demanded that his corpse be raised from the coffin and shown to the public.

  • LIFE

    Nang Nak at 20

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/07/2019

    » Thai cinema saw a new horizon open 20 years ago up this month. On July 23, 1999, a little film called Nang Nak opened in cinemas. An adaptation of the country's most popular ghost tale about a wife who died in childbirth but stuck around as a spirit waiting for her husband to return from war, the film arrived carrying high hopes -- and exceeded all of them. Nang Nak, directed by Nonzee Nimibutr and written by Wisit Sasanatieng, unleashed an unprecedented momentum of enthusiasm and became the first Thai movie to blaze past the 100-million-baht mark at the box office.

  • LIFE

    In Cannes, it's cinema as usual

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/05/2022

    » After the cancellation in 2020 and a bump to the month of July in 2021 -- with smaller attendance as international travel was still interrupted -- the Cannes Film Festival returns to its usual mid-May slot, keyed up and fully prepped to show the world that it's cinema, and the cinema business, as usual.

  • LIFE

    The horror of our inhumanity

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/09/2015

    » Historical films, when they stare into the abyss, are always horror films, and none attests to that with a greater conviction than German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. This is probably the most frightening documentary ever filmed, the sheer scope of inhumanity shown in it almost beyond belief if we didn't know that everything was indeed true. A very difficult film to watch, and certainly not for the faint-hearted and Holocaust deniers (not an endangered species here), this is one of the most important accounts of the event whose ramifications remain relevant 70 years after World War II ended.

  • LIFE

    Back to the source

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/07/2020

    » Evil is not banal in Ju-on: Origins, a particularly grisly six-part Netflix series. The J-horror wave that broke at the turn of the millennium may no longer be in vogue, but this supposed origin story of the 2001 Ju-On: The Grudge is probably even more extreme in its depiction of ghostly malice and vengeance. It's scarier too -- if you have a stomach for murder, disembowelment, matricide and self-combustibility -- because here the origin of violence is mostly domestic: the violence committed by father against mother, mother against daughter, husband against wife, friend against friend. It's a series (or you could see it as a three-hour film) about monsters that shows us that monstrosity really is born and raised first and foremost by humans.

  • LIFE

    Saint and sensibility

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2019

    » A Christian fable or a Marxist allegory? A magical-realist myth or a political cry against neoliberalism (or feudalism, which produces the same catastrophe anyway)?

  • LIFE

    Some Southeast Asian picks from the Busan International Film Festival

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/10/2018

    » How do Aceh and Japan, two places that seem unrelated, separated by a vast distance of land and sea, connect on the personal and historical level?

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