Showing 1 - 9 of 9
Cool Pattani
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/09/2019
» Last weekend, along an old street in Pattani, skater boys and Lambretta riders were hanging out with poets and activists. As the rain let up and the night cooled, jazz musicians hummed and strummed, while a DJ was spinning upbeat music next to a digitally-mapped, fashionably-faded brick wall.
Two grainy fists for resurrection
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/10/2018
» Shot mostly in Thai prison, with a fair number of ex-cons as extras, A Prayer Before Dawn dives headfirst into the unfiltered squalor of prison life -- not the sociological or political dimension of state incarceration, but the physical, uncooked-meat kind of life in jail, particularly the Thai jail.
Bridging times and cities
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/06/2018
» On a recent visit to Bangkok, Baron Patrick Nothomb recalled the tremors of anxiety when the Thai-Belgian bridge was about to be assembled 30 years ago.
Once lost, now found
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/02/2017
» The 69th Cannes Film Festival begins today in southern France with its usual fanfare. Regarded as the world's most prestigious event of cinema professionals, the festival celebrates film as art, commerce, glitz and as cultural treasure. Fittingly, this year Cannes has invited only one Thai film to screen in the Cannes Classics programme -- the recently discovered 1954 Santi-Vina, which was once thought to be lost and has now been restored to its celluloid glory.
Three stories from Asia
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/10/2016
» An illegal Filipino migrant in Hokkaido, a Japanese grandfather in Penang, a UN official reflecting on the romantic past in Phnom Penh. The three short films in the omnibus Asian Three-Fold Mirror: Reflections narrate the criss-crossing of destiny between Asian people -- or particularly in this case between Japanese and Southeast Asians. The Reflections project has been commissioned by the Japan Foundation and Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) as a means to show the mutual relationships, present or forgotten, among the Asian countries.
The Lobster is a love story like no other
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/11/2015
» The strangest movie of the year opens this week in Bangkok. The Lobster imagines a future world where single people are ostracised, then shipped off to "The Hotel", a clinically, sinisterly beautiful resort where they have to find a romantic partner within the deadline of 45 days. If they fail to find a "compatible" mate from among the singles herded there, they will be transformed into an animal of their choice and banished into the wild. Colin Farrell, glum and potbellied, plays David, who states that he wishes to become a lobster when his time comes.
Our blood runs cold in a burning sun
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/11/2015
» In Truman Capote’s true-crime book, In Cold Blood, a rural town in Kansas was rattled by brutal murders. Four people killed in their own home, late at night, three shot point-blank in the face, the other had his throat slit, then shot in the head. It was a robbery turned massacre. The morning after committing the crime, the book reports, one of the two killers, Dick Hickock, went back to his house and had toast for breakfast with his family, laughing, unperturbed, as if nothing so inhuman had happened just hours before.
The cheers for justice we haven’t heard
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/04/2015
» On Tuesday, the country watched Thai heartthrob Mario Maurer taking the greatest risk of his young life.
The reels keep turning
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/09/2014
» The preservation of movies involves storing for posterity a popular form of entertainment, but perhaps more importantly this repository can also protect an invaluable body of knowledge and wisdom about the individuals and society from which these works emanated. It took this country a long time to realise that the conservation of film is a cultural duty, and that our audiovisual heritage is a museum of memories that plays a vital part in educating future generations about their collective past.