Showing 1 - 9 of 9
2024 movie moments
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/12/2024
» The past year was surprisingly fantastic for Thai cinema, and a pretty good one for the rest of the world too.
Memories buried in soil
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/07/2019
» Memories and war, illusory borders and invisible scars: These themes are resonant in two documentary films shown late last month at the SAC Film Festival (hosted by the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre). In the Thai documentary Din Rai Dan (Soil Without Land), a Tai Yai man in Shan state talks about his life as a waiter in Bangkok and as a soldier in his ethnic army. In the Vietnamese film The Future Cries Beneath Our Soil, a group of men in a rural village bear the indelible wounds of the Vietnam War, still stinging after 40 years.
Underwater folly
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/06/2019
» In the aquatic chamber, the tank looms. Encrusted and barnacled, the mighty war machine has become a home of fish and corals. It seems incapacitated, abandoned, useless. Such is an illusion: if the tank is submerged, we're down there with it, drowned in that inexorable aquarium. Look, its gun still points at us, and its shadow all-consuming.
Mid-career recognition
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/08/2018
» Respect is earned, although in Thailand respect often comes with age. To motivate artists on the rise, the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Ministry of Culture, initiated the title Silpathorn Artist in 2003 to honour mid-career artists — those who've contributed to their respective fields for a number of years but still not 'masters'. The Silpathorn Award focuses on contemporary disciplines — fashion, architecture, literature, music, film, performing art and visual art — and recipients, who are between 30 to 50, represent the youthful, progressive energy in the Thai creative scene. An exhibition showing their bodies of work, from design sketches to a film screening, is ongoing at Ratchadamnoen Contemporary Art Center until Sept 9.
A poll date and elephant in the room
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/08/2018
» We've heard distant drumbeats and dates are being thrown around. The election will -- may -- happen on Feb 24, 2019, which is the Year of the Pig, if that portends anything. The latest possible date, if things get pushed around by design or by fate, is May. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe never. Who knows? For a regime that prides itself as rule-keepers, rules and promises have been treated like toilet paper since day one.
Chaiyaphum owed more than lost data
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/08/2018
» In the age of video clips, one video clip is absent. At a time when we're inundated by cat clips, dog clips, accident clips, slap clips, brawl clips, grope clips, chase clips, murder clips -- when we even have clips recorded from the depths of a dark cave where light hardly reaches -- it's amazing that one crucial clip, shot in broad daylight, is missing, lost or made to be lost forever, along with transparency and maybe justice.
Apocalypse again
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/05/2018
» Colonel Kurtz is returning to Scala. Nearly 30 years after it opened in Bangkok, Apocalypse Now will be screened this Sunday at noon at Scala, as part of Thai Film Archive's World's Classic Cinema series.
Familiar faces or rogues gallery?
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/02/2018
» The entire wall is covered with faces -- a zoo of faces, if you will, each of them caged by a square frame. Naturally, upon entering Artist+Run Gallery visitors engage in a guess-who game: these are familiar faces of politicians, celebrities, athletes, monks and coupmakers, and yet some of them aren't instantly identifiable. Is that the government spokesman? From which coup? Who's that pretty face? Is that reddish thing Thaksin Shinawatra? That's easy -- it's Aung San Suu Kyi.
Writing’s on wall for our democracy
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/01/2018
» The other day I saw some graffiti in a public toilet. It read, ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short, as the popular translation goes. Like a street artist, I decided to vandalise it, scratching out and changing the first bit with my poor Latin: dictatura longa, vita brevis. Dictatorship is long, life is short.