Showing 1 - 10 of 10
The world is on fire, but we still have the Oscars
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/03/2026
» Tight races in several categories as two outstanding American films, Sinners and One Battle After Another, vie for glory with other international titles.
Here's to all the useful ghosts of our history
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/08/2025
» Ghosts are useful because they remind us of the unresolved, the unsettled, the unfinished -- in life, love, politics, or history. The film of the moment hitches onto that idea and takes it far, as far as the Cannes Film Festival, and now it has been picked as Thailand's representative for the Oscars.
It's alive!
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/12/2021
» Doomsayers will have to hold out a little longer. Cinema -- as in people sitting in the dark taking in a communal experience of audiovisual sensations -- is still breathing, moving, enlightening.
Of Naga and political dissidents
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2021
» The Naga is real but the murder is not. Or is it vice versa? What history chooses to remember and relegate to oblivion, what it enshrines as story and what it buries as hearsay, is how the narrative of a nation is forged in a mould of clay or a furnace of fire. Or in this particular case, in disembowelled bodies stuffed with concrete blocks. The murder is real but the Naga is not. This sounds more like it.
The Year of Great Reckoning
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/12/2020
» For filmgoers, it was a year of mortal dread. The screen went dark, like a coffin nailed shut, and is still like that in many places. Faith in cinema as we've known it was rattled, challenged, and endangered with a Biblical overtone; it's a plague we're dealing with, after all. It was a year unlike any other we had seen before in the 125 years since cinema was invented. And while that sounds dispiriting, 2020 has also been a "Year of Great Reckoning" during which the equilibrium was recalibrated and the idea of moving images continues, as it should, to evolve.
Beyond borders
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/03/2020
» The two-channel video work by Ampannee Satoh begins with specks of light and ends, naturally, with darkness. Two cameras were attached at the bow and stern of a fishing boat, purportedly the same type used by Rohingya refugees when they fled whatever was hounding them into the sea. The images they captured are wobbly, disoriented, seasick-inducing, and for 20 minutes they simulate the experience of being lost at sea in the middle of the night -- the experience of displaced people unmoored in the lightless sea.
Quentin's Hollywood, circa 1969
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2019
» Not everything ended in the year 1969. Not every sunshiny starlet died gruesomely in her own Cielo Drive villa at the hands of crazed hippies. And not every potbellied actor, fading cowboy and washed-up stunt double bit the Hollywood dust kicked up by the changing of the guard and the closing of that heady decade. Not, at least, in Quentin Tarantino's affectionate, good-humoured, and surprisingly elegiac film about Hollywood and its oddball residents.
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.
Mid-career recognition
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/08/2018
» Respect is earned, although in Thailand respect often comes with age. To motivate artists on the rise, the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Ministry of Culture, initiated the title Silpathorn Artist in 2003 to honour mid-career artists — those who've contributed to their respective fields for a number of years but still not 'masters'. The Silpathorn Award focuses on contemporary disciplines — fashion, architecture, literature, music, film, performing art and visual art — and recipients, who are between 30 to 50, represent the youthful, progressive energy in the Thai creative scene. An exhibition showing their bodies of work, from design sketches to a film screening, is ongoing at Ratchadamnoen Contemporary Art Center until Sept 9.
Wild Boars may well need saving again
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/07/2018
» I thought we could let it rest, but apparently the post-rescue drama of the 13 cave survivors is here to stay. On Wednesday, the 13 Wild Boars members were put on stage in a live broadcast, a 6pm state-run slot usually reserved for military propaganda.