Showing 1 - 6 of 6
Cannes 2024 highlights
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/05/2024
» From Francis Ford Coppola's new epic to a Taiwanese drama starring a Thai actor and a Pol Pot drama, we pick hot titles from the French film festival that kicks off today.
A shady underworld
Life, Sawarin Suwichakornpong, Published on 03/05/2019
» We, The Survivors, the fourth novel by the Malaysian-British Tash Aw, is a compelling account of the life of a working-class lad named Lee Hock Lye, or known among friends as Ah Hock. It's a vivid tale of an imaginative young man with ideas of setting foot in a better place than a ramshackle village where livelihood depends on fishing and harvesting cockles from the polluted mudflats. Ah Hock isn't an angry young man, nor is he an idler who accepts whatever comes his way as fate. He tries hard with life, changing numbers of jobs to make ends meet, hoping one day he'd move to settle down with a house and family in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore or even farther afield. The world that he inhabits, however, is a microcosm of the much larger equilibrium, where society permits a select few to climb the ladder, and the majority -- the ilk of Ah Hock -- remains stuck in poverty, leading a life that's going nowhere.
Three stories from Asia
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/10/2016
» An illegal Filipino migrant in Hokkaido, a Japanese grandfather in Penang, a UN official reflecting on the romantic past in Phnom Penh. The three short films in the omnibus Asian Three-Fold Mirror: Reflections narrate the criss-crossing of destiny between Asian people -- or particularly in this case between Japanese and Southeast Asians. The Reflections project has been commissioned by the Japan Foundation and Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) as a means to show the mutual relationships, present or forgotten, among the Asian countries.
Ground reality
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/09/2016
» In The Road To Mandalay, young Myanmar migrants hide in the cargo of a truck trundling past the borders into Thailand. In Bangkok, they look for jobs with the dream that every Myanmar worker dreams: to save money and return home, or better, to go somewhere else where life is kinder. They both find work in a textile factory in the outskirts, the female weaving yarns and the male lifting machines. To them, Thailand is a land of hope, though they'll soon find out, like many Myanmar workers do, that it's also a limbo, a perpetual transit, a non-place where hope can be dashed in seconds and desire can turn into tragedy.
Below the surface
Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 11/05/2016
» In The Jam Factory Gallery's current exhibition "Asylum Seeker: The Pond And The Fireflies", artist Prapat Jiwarangsan himself is the asylum seeker, and the pond in question is actually around the house in Chiang Mai in which he took refuge after the 2014 coup. The show is comprised of a video installation, two series of photographs and a few ink-written letters.
Faces of hard truths
Life, Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana, Published on 19/11/2014
» Haryatin lost her sight in Saudi Arabia. She first left Indonesia in 1998 to work as domestic help. Her first employer was kind, the second miserly and the third committed horrendous physical acts of violence against her, leaving her disabled — all of this she told journalist Karen Emmons, who has been working with photographer Steve McCurry on a project entitled "No One Should Work This Way", documenting and exposing the abuse migrant domestic workers face across Asia and the Middle East.