Showing 61-70 of 145 results
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In School Town King, the kids are not all right
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/01/2021
» There's a sense of immediacy in School Town King, a Thai documentary about two teenage rappers from the Klong Toey slums. On the surface, this is an advocacy film, one that patiently follows the two underprivileged ghetto boys with an unorthodox dream and their misadventures in Thai schools. But what makes School Town King feel urgent is its exposé of structural narrow-mindedness and the ideological straightjacket that leaves no room for kids who do not fit the mould. The conservative school policy, the film suggests in its visual clues and off-the-cuff asides is a chronic condition that has worsened by the arrogantly old-school regime of past years. In the year of Bad Students and Free Youth upheaval, School Town King is a deafening confirmation that the kids are not all right -- and it's surprising only for ignorant adults why they no longer want to put up with it.
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Art as our escape
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 16/09/2020
» This year's theme is at once hopeful and ironic: "Escape Routes" suggests a flight from our unusual times of pathological disruption and political cataclysm -- here, there and everywhere -- and yet the theme is an acknowledgment of those in-our-face uncertainties from which we struggle to find an exit.
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Cool Pattani
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 06/09/2019
» Last weekend, along an old street in Pattani, skater boys and Lambretta riders were hanging out with poets and activists. As the rain let up and the night cooled, jazz musicians hummed and strummed, while a DJ was spinning upbeat music next to a digitally-mapped, fashionably-faded brick wall.
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Through the looking glass
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 15/02/2019
» Tish Rivers, the woman in James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk, muses to the reader in the book's first pages: "I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass."
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Mid-career recognition
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/08/2018
» Respect is earned, although in Thailand respect often comes with age. To motivate artists on the rise, the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Ministry of Culture, initiated the title Silpathorn Artist in 2003 to honour mid-career artists — those who've contributed to their respective fields for a number of years but still not 'masters'. The Silpathorn Award focuses on contemporary disciplines — fashion, architecture, literature, music, film, performing art and visual art — and recipients, who are between 30 to 50, represent the youthful, progressive energy in the Thai creative scene. An exhibition showing their bodies of work, from design sketches to a film screening, is ongoing at Ratchadamnoen Contemporary Art Center until Sept 9.
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The theory of Hawking as a parallel Thai
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/03/2018
» Had Stephen Hawking been born here, the fate of astrophysics would likely have been different: no Theory of Everything, just a Hypothesis of Nothing. Had he been born here, the starburst of his extraordinary life would have been sucked into a black hole, a metaphorical black hole, and the proof that the universe can be so unkind to some people would have been concluded.
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In Three Billboards, pain and grief seek a visual expression
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 09/03/2018
» Frances McDormand is an embodiment of maternal anger and defiance, of the weight of grief and guilt, which often comes in tandem. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, her sorrow, festered into rage, is the emotional epicentre of the film that strives to quake all the American fault lines, moral, racial and political, and she gives a gut-punching performance in a classic feminist register that, as we have seen, eventually won her an Oscar.
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Taking an axe to 'Land of Smiles'
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/02/2018
» By now it must be obvious: "The Land of Smiles" is a myth. The biggest myth, wrapped in a legend hidden in hogwash. In Thailand, a smile won't get us anywhere, only an axe wielded in rage does. I bet in a few days a new bumper sticker will appear: "Watch Out, Axe Lady In Car".
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Vampires rule roost in this heartless land
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/11/2017
» The mother looked for her son's heart in a foam box. "Where is it?" she asked. She's already had his body, and only when she requested was she was allowed to take back his soul.
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On the ‘right’ side of crime and impunity
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/09/2017
» Crime and punishment, or crime and impunity? For most people, the former. For the powerful, the well connected, for those on the right side of history, maybe the latter.
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