Showing 1 - 10 of 12
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.
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.
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?
BIFF unveils rich line-up
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2021
» The Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) has unveiled the line-up for its 26th edition to take place on-site from Oct 6-15. Asia's premier gathering of film professionals aims to shake off pandemic-related uncertainties with a slate of over 190 titles, with the focus on Asian cinema as usual. Busan is also pushing for a wider definition of "film festival" by including, for the first time, television series as part of its official programme.
Melancholy and absurdity
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/05/2021
» Chaitanya Tamhane was 27 years old when his breakthrough film Court became a critical sensation and won the Lion of the Future Award at the Venice festival in 2014. A film of understated power about India's Kafkaesque judicial tribulation, Court announced the arrival of an exceptional talent from Mumbai, a proud cinema city usually associated with rambunctious Bollywood titles.
In School Town King, the kids are not all right
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/01/2021
» There's a sense of immediacy in School Town King, a Thai documentary about two teenage rappers from the Klong Toey slums. On the surface, this is an advocacy film, one that patiently follows the two underprivileged ghetto boys with an unorthodox dream and their misadventures in Thai schools. But what makes School Town King feel urgent is its exposé of structural narrow-mindedness and the ideological straightjacket that leaves no room for kids who do not fit the mould. The conservative school policy, the film suggests in its visual clues and off-the-cuff asides is a chronic condition that has worsened by the arrogantly old-school regime of past years. In the year of Bad Students and Free Youth upheaval, School Town King is a deafening confirmation that the kids are not all right -- and it's surprising only for ignorant adults why they no longer want to put up with it.
Corona and the death of cinema (again)
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/03/2020
» "Cinema is an invention without a future," said Louis Lumiere who, along with his brother Auguste, invented the Cinematographe in 1895. From its birth, cinema was convinced of its own death. From the very beginning, cinema predicted its own eventual demise. And that was before the two world wars, the advent of home video, laser disc, DVDs, Blu-rays, terrorism, mass shootings, Netflix, and now the coronavirus, the latest scourge that has sealed shut cinema houses around the world.
Ghosts of various stripes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/09/2018
» Refugees, human-trafficking and a ravenous ghoul show the real and fantastical facets of Thailand in the movies showing this week at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The French Connection
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/05/2018
» In the opening episode of Ten Years Thailand, a group of soldiers arrives at an art gallery to inspect a potentially subversive artwork. What constitutes a kernel of subversion, however, is hard to lay a finger on. So the story shifts: one of the soldiers begins to chat up a pretty maid, and as the Sun is setting the two of them look out from the gallery to the horizon full of shadows. Maybe of hope.
The inevitability of farewell
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/02/2018
» A truly remarkable Thai film, Malila: The Farewell Flower takes big risks and makes it seem the most natural thing in the world.