Showing 1 - 10 of 10
Asean Film Festival is finally here
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/03/2024
» Despite the odd, unexplained double postponement -- the first when it was moved from early December 2023 to late January 2024, and then from January to March -- the Bangkok Asean Film Festival finally gets under way, from today until Sunday at SF CentralWorld. Despite the adjournment, the line-up looks decent, with the best Southeast Asian titles culled from the past year -- Tiger Stripes, Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell, Abang Adik, Dreaming And Dying, Oasis Of Now, Nowhere Near, Morrison, Thai classics The Adventure Of Sudsakorn and The Adulterer, and a short film competition.
Asian talents score big at Cannes
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 31/05/2023
» From Japan to Malaysia by way of Vietnam, Asian filmmakers of disparate sensibilities triumphed at the recently-wrapped 76th Cannes Film Festival. The Palme d'Or may have gone to French filmmaker Justine Triet from her tense drama Anatomy Of A Fall, but six other awards handed out by the world's most influential film festival went to filmmakers from Asia, an unprecedented slate of recognition.
Hear her roar
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/05/2023
» The image of a girl taking off her hijab is wrought with cinematic symbolism. Kamila Andini shows it in her Indonesian film Yuni (2021); Hesome Chemamah in his Thai short I'm Not Your F*cking Stereotype (2019); Ana Lily Amirpour in the Iranian vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014). Subversion? Provocation? Liberation? At this year's Cannes Film Festival, we see that image in Amanda Nell Eu's Tiger Stripes, a work as playful as it is potent in its portrayal of adolescence and what it entails for a young woman's body.
10 films to watch out for
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2023
» A fierce hijab girl, a Vietnamese pilgrimage, a Scorsese-DiCaprio team up and a new Cate Blanchett drama, Cannes Film Festival opens today with an eclectic taste of world cinema.
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.
Some Southeast Asian picks from the Busan International Film Festival
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/10/2018
» How do Aceh and Japan, two places that seem unrelated, separated by a vast distance of land and sea, connect on the personal and historical level?
Mahathir's win shows voting works
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/05/2018
» This week all my friends went to vote. In Malaysia, of course.
Yayoi Kusama joins Bangkok Art Biennale roster
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2018
» Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist extraordinaire known for her flamboyant polka dots and infinite mirrored rooms, will join the roster of 75 international artists at the first Bangkok Art Biennale, a much-anticipated art event to take place from Oct 19 this year.
Human traffic
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/11/2017
» Edmund Yeo started writing the film Aqerat before the word "Rohingya" would make world news headlines -- entirely for a distressing reason. Now the Malaysian film, which had its premiere in the main competition of the 30th Tokyo International Film Festival this week, has proved prescient as over 500,000 of Myanmar's Rohingya minority have fled violence for Bangladesh in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in years.
Life, love, liberation
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/09/2017
» In the sole Thai film showing at Toronto International Film Festival this week, a soap opera star stuck in a loveless marriage tangles with an eccentric hitman and a powerful cult. Samui Song is the latest feature film by Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, who's fashioned a crime thriller that also plays as a critique of many things: patriarchal oppression, faux-Buddhism, public healthcare and the act of cinema-making itself.