Showing 1 - 9 of 9
The passion of Pasolini
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/06/2022
» Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna on March 5, 1922, and died in a violent, mysterious circumstance on the outskirts of Rome in November 1975. This year marks the centenary of the Italian poet's and filmmaker's birth, and this Sunday at 1pm, the Thai Film Archive will screen Pasolini's first film as director, Accattone, a gloriously austere ode to underclass plight. It will be the first time the 1961 film is screened in Thailand.
In Cannes, it's cinema as usual
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/05/2022
» After the cancellation in 2020 and a bump to the month of July in 2021 -- with smaller attendance as international travel was still interrupted -- the Cannes Film Festival returns to its usual mid-May slot, keyed up and fully prepped to show the world that it's cinema, and the cinema business, as usual.
Girlhood and a city in flux
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/10/2021
» An Indonesian teen drama and Cambodian prize-winner shine at Busan Film Festival.
Of Naga and political dissidents
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/09/2021
» The Naga is real but the murder is not. Or is it vice versa? What history chooses to remember and relegate to oblivion, what it enshrines as story and what it buries as hearsay, is how the narrative of a nation is forged in a mould of clay or a furnace of fire. Or in this particular case, in disembowelled bodies stuffed with concrete blocks. The murder is real but the Naga is not. This sounds more like it.
Come and see (no need to pray)
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/04/2021
» In an ordinary democracy, a film like Ehipassiko (in English, Come And See) shouldn't have had the least bit of worry about the possibility of being banned. The subject itself initially provoked the censors' impulse: this is a finely-tuned, patiently observed documentary about the controversial Wat Dhammakaya and the dramatic 2017 siege of the temple.
An imperfect world
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/05/2019
» Even on the ground at the Cannes Film Festival, what people seemed to be anticipating most on Monday was, well, the final episode of Game Of Thrones. No, it wasn't being shown at the festival (how unbecoming that would be), but isn't it a sign of our times that a TV episode has the Valyrian-steel nerve to dominate global discussion and upstage the world's biggest film showcase?
Jim Jarmusch's zombies open Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2019
» 'Infernal hipsters and their irony." So says a very unhip character in The Dead Don't Die, and of course, what else could it be? Jim Jarmusch's zombie comedy opened the 72nd Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday night with a sort-of infernal hipness that both literalises and subverts the zombie formula -- with mixed results.
Through the looking glass
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/02/2019
» Tish Rivers, the woman in James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk, muses to the reader in the book's first pages: "I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass."
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.