Showing 1 - 10 of 14
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 magic of Méliès
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/11/2024
» Among the many museums in Paris, the Musée Méliès may slip through visitors' attention. That should not be the case.
The Silent Film Festival keeps echoing
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/09/2024
» A rocket-bullet plunging into the Moon’s eye, its mouth pursed halfway between a sneer and a smile. You’ve seen it before, but it’s time to witness one of cinema’s most recognisable images from Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902) in its colour glory at the 8th Silent Film Festival in Thailand, the annual banquet of early cinema hosted by the Thai Film Archive.
Will gentrification respect city's people?
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/06/2023
» We've lived for over a century in the shadow of grandeur: near the Customs House, known to Thais as rongpasi. "We" means my maternal family and the community of Haroon Mosque. Each day before sunrise, the muezzin's sing-song call rings through the neighbourhood, carried on the river wind towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the French Embassy and Assumption Cathedral.
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.
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.
Be my guest
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/12/2019
» Some arrived by boat, others by air. Some came when the British still ruled their homeland, others were driven by the bloodshed of The Partition. Some came with numerous gods, others with the one and only Allah. Some came from near Bombay, others from in and around Madras. Some came with the intention of returning, others arrived knowing that there was no going back.
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.
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.
Thai film editor joins Oscars academy
Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/07/2019
» Thai film editor Lee Chatametikool has been made a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, meaning he will be eligible to vote for the Oscars.