• LIFE

  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.

• LIFE

  A long crusade against healthcare woes

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/04/2021

  » Colectiv, a Romanian documentary film nominated for two Oscars, watches in terror as the Romanian healthcare system practically collapses before the camera. The film elicits a series of gasps, as one shocking revelation leads to another, and another: procurement frauds, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, nepotism, murder, mass bribery, healthcare mafia, maggots crawling on the head of a patient -- a living patient -- and finally, an election whose preposterous results ring too many familiar bells.

• LIFE

  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.

• LIFESTYLE

  Report from the far South

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/01/2018

  » The first issue of The Melayu Review has the clean sophistication of a respectable literary journal. The layout is unfussy, the photographs black-and-white, and the text in Thai, in shipshape blocks. An editor's note on the first page quotes Dostoyevsky: "But how could you live and have no story to tell?"

• OPINION

  In our online rants, avoid Satan's traps

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2017

  » Extremism is the work of shai'tan, said my friend who just returned from haj, using the Arabic word for "Satan". Ignore it if you can, he warned me, "or you'll fall into its trap".

• LIFE

  The inciting incident

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/10/2017

  » On Sept 24, 1976, two electricians were beaten and hanged to death from the top of a gate somewhere in Nakhon Pathom, victims of an escalating right-wing terror in Thai politics of that heady decade. Two weeks later, as protests against the return to the Kingdom of former dictator Gen Thanom Kittikajorn gathered steam, students at Thammasat University staged a play about the hanging of the two men. Soon the photographs of the play were used by nationalists to whip up anger and fear of communism, which led to the massacre on the morning of Oct 6 as police and militias laid siege to the university, killing, maiming and brutalising scores of people in one of the worst incidents of bloodshed in modern Thai history.

• OPINION

  Toon and Pai, the tale of our two Jesuses

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/12/2017

  » Let's say, modestly, that Toon Bodyslam is Jesus Christ.

• LIFE

  Windows on the world

  Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/09/2017

  » As Hussain Currimbhoy sees it, this is a golden age for documentary filmmaking, a time when the criss-crossing narratives of the world tangle with audiences' growing suspicion over traditional media. The emergence of streaming services has also revolutionised distribution philosophy and connected doc-makers with audiences in ways unseen before, especially with audiences who once had little interest in documentary titles.

• LIFE

  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.

• OPINION

  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.

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