Showing 1 - 10 of 11
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.
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.
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.
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.
Spirit of the mountain
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/11/2018
» The rugged village of Gatlang in Nepal is the subject of a documentary film showing at select Major Cineplexes this weekend. Director Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Passakorn Pramunwong seemed to have picked an unexpected topic for their new non-fiction work (after their collaboration in the political history doc Paradoxocrazy in 2013), and Gatlang turns out to be a soothing journey, part diary of a post-earthquake rebuilding and part portrait of the people in a remote corner of the world.
Deep trouble
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/06/2018
» He got up close with a 13m whale shark near the Galapagos and swam with a curious hunchback whale in Tonga. "She was larger than a bus," he said, "the largest animal I've ever seen." At Burma Banks in the Indian Ocean, he drifted with sharks and at Similan Islands he realised that the coral reefs in the Thai seas were among the most beautiful in the world.
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.
Image is everything
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/05/2018
» Cinema, Jean-Luc Godard said via FaceTime, is X+3 = 1. The X, of course, is -2.
A one-man 'loveable rogues' gallery
B Magazine, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/05/2018
» Sunny Suwanmethanont raises his thick eyebrows and chuckles. He forks a piece of mango into his mouth while he considers something -- an existential query of sorts.