Showing 1-10 of 20 results
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Will gentrification respect city's people?
Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/06/2023
» We've lived for over a century in the shadow of grandeur: near the Customs House, known to Thais as rongpasi. "We" means my maternal family and the community of Haroon Mosque. Each day before sunrise, the muezzin's sing-song call rings through the neighbourhood, carried on the river wind towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the French Embassy and Assumption Cathedral.
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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.
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The Year of Great Reckoning
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/12/2020
» For filmgoers, it was a year of mortal dread. The screen went dark, like a coffin nailed shut, and is still like that in many places. Faith in cinema as we've known it was rattled, challenged, and endangered with a Biblical overtone; it's a plague we're dealing with, after all. It was a year unlike any other we had seen before in the 125 years since cinema was invented. And while that sounds dispiriting, 2020 has also been a "Year of Great Reckoning" during which the equilibrium was recalibrated and the idea of moving images continues, as it should, to evolve.
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In the realm of Manta Ray
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/07/2019
» There's a shot of a manta ray in Manta Ray, and one is invited to read into the symbolism of the gliding creature whose journey transcends man-made boundaries. Kraben Rahu (Manta Ray) is the most anticipated Thai film of the year, and after almost a full year of travelling the film festivals of the world, like the majestic fish itself across the ocean, it has come ashore in select Thai cinemas this week.
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Outstanding films of 2018
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/12/2018
» From the spiritual to the scary, many genres had quality offerings.
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The many interpretations of bliss
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 08/10/2018
» With the monsoon comes the art. With the wind and bluster come the artists. Here it is, finally, after a year of fanfare and preparation. The first Bangkok Art Biennale 2018 (BAB 2018) will open on Oct 18 and run until next February in a city-wide surfeit of artistic affairs, from exhibitions to talks, workshops to pool parties (which is, of course, art!). The programme will keep Bangkokians and visitors busy for months starting from next week.
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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?"
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Oscar contenders from around the world
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/11/2017
» A record 92 films have been submitted to the Oscar Foreign Language Film category. We take a look at some
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View from a veteran
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/03/2017
» The list of hits he has created in the past 20 years is long and staggering: Visute Poolvoralaks, perhaps Thailand's best-known film producer, is the man behind the renaissance of Thai cinema in the mid-1990s with Dang Bireley's And Young Gangsters, Nang Nak and Satree Lex, before becoming part of the hit-making machine GTH to push Fan Chan, Hello Stranger and the highest-grossing Thai film of all time, Phi Mak Phrakanong. Estimated box-office intake commandeered from his desk: nearly 2 billion baht.
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In the eye of the storm
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/09/2016
» The photograph is brutal because the reality is brutal.
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