Showing 1-10 of 180 results
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Art and coup: Four years and counting
Life, Ariane Kupferman-Sutthavong, Published on 23/05/2018
» Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary of the May 2014 coup d'etat. While it continues to underpin the political landscape, the coup also sparked an unprecedented rise in Thai artworks with political messages. A new political art exhibition took place almost every month since May 2014.
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Getting soft power right
Life, Published on 08/01/2024
» After three months in office, the Srettha Thavisin government has raved on about populist policies in the guise of digital wallets and soft power projects that will create income to boost our declining economy. With optimism, we learned that Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Pheu Thai party leader and head of the National Soft Power Strategy Committee (NSPSC), has drafted a budget of 5.1 billion baht to boost festivals and creative industries. It is welcoming news to hear this government is priortising art, music, literature, design, fashion, film, food, games, sports and festivals as essential sources for the creative economy. Where this enormous chunk of budget will come from, like digital wallets, remains to be seen.
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Sounds of change
Life, Tatat Bunnag, Published on 05/08/2020
» A universal language? A medium to send messages across? Therapy? Or mere entertainment? Music serves different purposes and has been known to have great power over the human psyche.
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Hanging politics on the wall
Life, Ariane Kupferman-Sutthavong, Published on 31/05/2017
» Art and artists aren't as detached from worldly matters as many like to think. In the past couple of years, contemporary artists have undoubtedly given form to some of the most daring and powerful expressions of our collective feelings of angst, unrest and hope -- while increasingly becoming aware of, and subject to, the restrictions on freedoms that are in place.
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Colonia misses mark
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 22/04/2016
» Chile, 1973. General Augusto Pinochet stages a coup against the democratically elected Salvadore Allende and rounds up radicals, opponents, students and left-wing activists. That's the story we all know. In the film Colonia, German director Florian Gallenberger turns our attention to a sidebar -- the rise of Pinochet mirrored by the dark faux-Christian cult led by an ex-Nazi, headquartered in a fenced-off commune in a rural setting and specialising in brainwashing young people into mindless zombies. The dictatorship of the state fuels the dictatorship of the mind, and vice versa. It should have been a good story, only that, as told here, it is not.
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The end is now
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/04/2015
» The final instalment of The Legend Of King Naresuan franchise is a surprisingly lean 100-minute tribute to the ancient king. It feels less overblown than the previous three parts (which each ran over two hours), with more compact storytelling and an unexpected sense of mournful panegyric. After eight years, countless delays, hiccups and political undercurrents, and a combined 800-million-baht receipt, the country's longest-running film project — a clumsy shot at militaristic patriotism that began four months after the 2006 coup d'etat and ends this month, in another post-coup period — is now over. But at least this epilogue finishes with a faint glimmer of grace that has been largely missing over the years.
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Breaking the bloody iceberg
Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 16/07/2015
» Teerawat Mulvilai knows he's being watched onstage. In his case specifically, it is with extreme scrutiny, a sense of wonder and perplexity. Standing very still seems just as significant as when he moves. He's done it many times before, namely in the first two instalments of his solo performance in Satapana (Establishment), which were Red Tank followed by Iceberg, last year.
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Smiling in plain view
Life, Achara Ashayagachat, Published on 08/10/2014
» It's very rare for him not to smile. He smiles when he speaks. In fact, he even smiled when he was hauled into a police truck on the night the military announced Thailand's 19th coup. He also smiled — as some photographs showed — when he was subsequently brought back twice to a military camp.
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A part of Myanmar's tapestry
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/06/2016
» Even with the civilian government, the military is still untouchable in Myanmar -- at least in the movies. Last week state censorship banned the film Twilight Over Burma: My Life As A Shan Princess, an Austrian production about the real-life Austrian woman who met a Shan prince in the US, married him and moved to Burma before the 1962 military coup d'etat that brought everything down. The film, which was shot largely in Thailand and starring mostly German and Thai actors, was supposed to open the Human Rights Film Festival in Yangon last Tuesday.
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Alice in chains
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/01/2016
» In Still Alice, a linguistics professor starts losing her grasp of language, bearing and memory. Alice (Julianne Moore) is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, and for a person whose lifelong devotion is to words and what words can do, the disease is an existential coup. This tender, warmly-lit and empathetic film is billed as a family drama. It's also a horror story, one in which the demon inside Alice can never be defeated.
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