Showing 1 - 10 of 84
Living in Thailand's age of impunity
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/01/2026
» There's no place like Thailand. Joyscrolling TikTok and Reels reveals dozens of clips made by international visitors lamenting having to leave our lovely country and return to dreary Europe or joyless America. "Nobody talks about how hard it is to go from this" -- insert a cut of a wonderful beach in Krabi -- "to this"--cut to a drab, damp suburban street somewhere in the West. Add a crying-face emoji. "I want to move here!" the traveller announces. True, everybody loves Thailand.
The politics of taste in our election season
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/12/2025
» Hell is other people's tastes. Hell is when we passionately hate what people unconditionally love. Hell is when we can't fathom how anyone on the face of the earth can like someone or something we find revolting -- a food, a film, a style, an opening ceremony, a politician, a president.
Where the struggle begins
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/11/2025
» Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36 reminds us that the question of Palestine didn't begin two years ago but generations before that. Showing at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the film is set in the aftermath of World War I as the European powers carve up the Middle East like a spoiled child slicing his birthday cake: gleefully, arbitrarily, jabbing their fingers on a map with no regard of history or the need of local inhabitants.
Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Morte Cucina shows off killer Thai cuisine at Tokyo film festival
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/10/2025
» Pen-ek Ratanaruang's new film features a protagonist on a quest for culinary retribution -- a triglyceride revenge trip that gets greasier and weirder along the way.
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.
Cinema of resistance wins at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/05/2025
» In a year full of richly textured stories about female trauma and painful personal growth, the Cannes jury, led by Juliette Binoche, took the noble route and gave the Palme d'Or to the most political film in the 22-title competition.
Woman directors fare strongly at Cannes this year
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2025
» Cannes 2025 features seven films by female directors in the main competition, equalling the record set in 2023.
"A Useful Ghost" will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/04/2025
» An offbeat social satire "A Useful Ghost" (Phee Chai Dai Ka) will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next month, becoming the first Thai film in 10 years to be selected by the prestigious festival and the first ever to be programmed in Semaine de la critics (Critics' Week), a section dedicated to filmmakers with first or second films.
Paradise lost
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2025
» In Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes' beguiling travelogue set in 1917, a British diplomat in Burma journeys across Southeast Asia, hopping from country to country, to avoid an encounter with his fiancée. Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is a colonial officer who, struck by an inexplicable premonition or a case of cold feet, decides to flee Mandalay just before his sweetheart Molly (Crista Alfaiate) is due to arrive. He boards a ship to Singapore, then a train to Bangkok -- it derails on the way, but still makes it -- and onwards to Saigon, Manila, Osaka and Chongqing. Molly, pursuing him, would repeat a more or less similar route.
And the winner is...
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/02/2025
» The words and the verdicts on Oscars 2025.