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  • News & article

    Tears of the common people

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/09/2016

    » At 227 minutes -- less than four hours -- Ang Babaeng Humayo (The Woman Who Left) is rather short by Lav Diaz's standard. His previous film, Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis (A Lullaby To The Sorrowful Mystery), runs at seven hours. And throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, the Filipino master made films ranging in length from nine to 13 hours, something unorthodox, anomalous, even transgressive in the fast-food mentality of the modern multiplex. A four-hour film, any distributor would tell you, will scare people off. There's no room for patience and meditation in cinema these days.

  • News & article

    Keeping it real

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/10/2018

    » Boonsong Nakphoo keeps making movies, regardless of the obstacles. A champion of small people and small stories, he has lamented the difficulties of surviving in the movie business for years and yet he keeps churning out film after film, usually on a meagre budget. His latest output is now in cinemas: Nane Kradod Kampaeng (The Wall) recounts his own early struggle to make it as a filmmaker.

  • News & article

    Diving into the cave

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/01/2019

    » Of all the films scheduled to come out in 2019, one will return Thailand to the headlines. Various projects based on last year's dramatic rescue of the 12 Wild Boars footballers and their coach have been touted, and now a Thai film has completed principle photography and is going through post-production.

  • News & article

    Asean Film Festival is finally here

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/03/2024

    » Despite the odd, unexplained double postponement -- the first when it was moved from early December 2023 to late January 2024, and then from January to March -- the Bangkok Asean Film Festival finally gets under way, from today until Sunday at SF CentralWorld. Despite the adjournment, the line-up looks decent, with the best Southeast Asian titles culled from the past year -- Tiger Stripes, Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell, Abang Adik, Dreaming And Dying, Oasis Of Now, Nowhere Near, Morrison, Thai classics The Adventure Of Sudsakorn and The Adulterer, and a short film competition.

  • News & article

    The afterlife of Mitr Chaibancha

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/10/2023

    » In an abrupt moment of life's brutal script, Mitr Chaibancha fell to his death from a helicopter ladder on Oct 8, 1970. He was filming Insee Thong (Golden Eagle), playing an anti-communist masked hero, when he slipped from the rung and plunged to the ground in Pattaya. That same evening, his body was transported to Wat Kae Nang Loeng. Thousands of people, unable to believe that Thailand's most famous actor was really, tragically dead, amassed impromptu at the temple and demanded that his corpse be raised from the coffin and shown to the public.

  • News & article

    Coldplay across the universe

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/02/2024

    » The latest Coldplay concert in Bangkok was a feat of photogenic spectacles designed to bedazzle, complete with light-blinking wristbands, sci-fi-warped animation on spherical screens, balloons in the shape of planets and exploding fireworks above the roof of Rajamangala National Stadium ("The football field not often used to play football on," as a Thai national squad member noted.)

  • News & article

    Pandemonium

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 30/09/2022

    » The first shot of Athena will be discussed in every writing about the film. A bravura choreography of movement that begins with an intimate close-up of a face and ends, after 10 blood-rushing minutes, with an explosion of revolutionary rage -- a la Les Miserables and Do You Hear The People Sing? transported to a predominantly-Muslim Paris suburb -- that opening shot is so hypnotising and immersive in its non-stop kineticism that we're led to forgive that it's also an earnest show-off, a proud enshrinement of style and attitude over everything else. Romain Gavras, a filmmaker known for making music videos for Jay Z and M.I.A, will cement that approach with many similar shots throughout the film -- long, seemingly uninterrupted shots with parkour camerawork full of angry bodies -- more than enough for aspiring filmmakers of the world to slobber over.

  • News & article

    It's alive!

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/12/2021

    » Doomsayers will have to hold out a little longer. Cinema -- as in people sitting in the dark taking in a communal experience of audiovisual sensations -- is still breathing, moving, enlightening.

  • News & article

    Hear her roar

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/05/2023

    » The image of a girl taking off her hijab is wrought with cinematic symbolism. Kamila Andini shows it in her Indonesian film Yuni (2021); Hesome Chemamah in his Thai short I'm Not Your F*cking Stereotype (2019); Ana Lily Amirpour in the Iranian vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014). Subversion? Provocation? Liberation? At this year's Cannes Film Festival, we see that image in Amanda Nell Eu's Tiger Stripes, a work as playful as it is potent in its portrayal of adolescence and what it entails for a young woman's body.

  • News & article

    10 films to watch out for

    Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/05/2023

    » A fierce hijab girl, a Vietnamese pilgrimage, a Scorsese-DiCaprio team up and a new Cate Blanchett drama, Cannes Film Festival opens today with an eclectic taste of world cinema.

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