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  • News & article

    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.

  • News & article

    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.

  • News & article

    The next step in evolution

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 27/05/2022

    » The maestro is teasing us, with his favourite instrument: the scalpel. Mechanical, electrified scalpels that split open the flesh -- often, the belly -- like a bulging purse being unzipped. This time, what comes out of the belly is a menagerie of grotesque organs -- organs with neither names nor functions, grown inside the body primed for involuntary evolution.

  • News & article

    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.

  • News & article

    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.

  • News & article

    Melancholy and absurdity

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/05/2021

    » Chaitanya Tamhane was 27 years old when his breakthrough film Court became a critical sensation and won the Lion of the Future Award at the Venice festival in 2014. A film of understated power about India's Kafkaesque judicial tribulation, Court announced the arrival of an exceptional talent from Mumbai, a proud cinema city usually associated with rambunctious Bollywood titles.

  • News & article

    Rebel without a cause

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/05/2021

    » She came, she provoked, she burned, she left pools of blood and bits of brain on the school yard while laughing her pretty head off all the way to purgatory. She's Nanno, the demon child with Lolita's freckles and the Joker's face-splitting grin. She's the headline girl from the hit Thai series Girl From Nowhere which, since the May 7 release of its Season 2 on Netflix, has made it to the top-10 chart in many Asian countries and summited the algorithm in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. In China, the series' hashtag was for a time trending on Weibo (Nanno's Thai school uniform also inspires Chinese cosplayers).

  • News & article

    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.

  • News & article

    Revisiting Wong's dance of desire

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/10/2020

    » Drenched with desire, Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood For Love feels like a plush, vivid dream lodged in the deepest recess of a lover's heart. Now, the heart is beating again and the dream is being projected on the big screen some 20 years after the film first stunned audiences at Cannes and launched a wave of copycats around Asia.

  • News & article

    Climbing the one-inch barrier

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/02/2020

    » Hollywood gasped with embarrassment and sudden realisation when Bong Joon-ho, the director of Parasite, said in his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes: "Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to many more amazing films."

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