Showing 1 - 10 of 25
A Thai actor takes the stage at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/05/2024
» In a dreary rural town in Taiwan, illegal Southeast Asian workers live a precarious existence toiling away in farms or homes while enduring tough bosses and prying authorities. Most of them are from the Philippines or Indonesia, but there are also a large number from Myanmar and Thailand.
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.
Harry takes Bangkok in Styles
Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/03/2023
» The accessory du jour was the fluffy pink boa. The color scheme was hot pink - pink pants, pink boots, pink cowboy hats, pink eye-shadow, pink hijabs. Or if not pink, then anything in the tooth-aching shades of the rainbow. It was a lively, joyous sight on Saturday night, a show of hot-colored aesthetics in a defiant contrast to the brutalist concrete skeleton of Rajamangala Stadium. How I wish concrete-mad Bangkok could look like this every day!
The vagabond returns
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 20/01/2023
» A film once overlooked and misunderstood may have found its moment many years later, the work's peculiar vibrations finally detected and at last appreciated.
Time for Asean films to shine
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/12/2021
» The pandemic notwithstanding, it has been a stimulating year for Southeast Asian cinema. Reflective, heartfelt and oddball new titles from Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have won major prizes or become critical favourites at international film festivals throughout 2021. Now, many of these films are coming to the big screen in Thailand as the Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2021 (BAFF) is set to open tonight.
Thai project wins at Doc By The Sea
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/09/2021
» An important gathering of documentary filmmakers in Southeast Asia "Doc By The Sea" this year had to move online, though it remains a rich, stimulating event that contributes to the documentary community in the region. Usually held in Bali -- thus the "by the sea" moniker -- DBTS this year was titled "Doc By The Sea Accelerator 2021", with a week-long event that ran from Aug 16 to Sept 4 consisting of workshops, masterclasses and pitching sessions for new documentary projects from around the region, while mentors also logged in from Europe, the US and Asia to give commentary and guidance.
Back to the source
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/07/2020
» Evil is not banal in Ju-on: Origins, a particularly grisly six-part Netflix series. The J-horror wave that broke at the turn of the millennium may no longer be in vogue, but this supposed origin story of the 2001 Ju-On: The Grudge is probably even more extreme in its depiction of ghostly malice and vengeance. It's scarier too -- if you have a stomach for murder, disembowelment, matricide and self-combustibility -- because here the origin of violence is mostly domestic: the violence committed by father against mother, mother against daughter, husband against wife, friend against friend. It's a series (or you could see it as a three-hour film) about monsters that shows us that monstrosity really is born and raised first and foremost by humans.
On the edge of sanity
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/01/2020
» In Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse, Willem Dafoe is a demented Poseidon, or perhaps a crazed, ocean-battered ex-sailor on the run from a Melville novel. Playing one of the two lighthouse keepers on a wind-whipped rocky islet in the Atlantic, circa 1890s, Dafoe turns up his mad-uncle mode, feral hair, chronic farting and drawling speech, plus a possessive relationship with the lantern -- the source of light atop the lighthouse (he refers to it as a "she").
Cool Pattani
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/09/2019
» Last weekend, along an old street in Pattani, skater boys and Lambretta riders were hanging out with poets and activists. As the rain let up and the night cooled, jazz musicians hummed and strummed, while a DJ was spinning upbeat music next to a digitally-mapped, fashionably-faded brick wall.
SEA of delights
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/07/2019
» The Bangkok Asean Film Festival runs until July 8 and features 30 titles. Here are our top picks.