Showing 1 - 6 of 6
Where the struggle begins
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/11/2025
» Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36 reminds us that the question of Palestine didn't begin two years ago but generations before that. Showing at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the film is set in the aftermath of World War I as the European powers carve up the Middle East like a spoiled child slicing his birthday cake: gleefully, arbitrarily, jabbing their fingers on a map with no regard of history or the need of local inhabitants.
Paradise lost
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/04/2025
» In Grand Tour, Miguel Gomes' beguiling travelogue set in 1917, a British diplomat in Burma journeys across Southeast Asia, hopping from country to country, to avoid an encounter with his fiancée. Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) is a colonial officer who, struck by an inexplicable premonition or a case of cold feet, decides to flee Mandalay just before his sweetheart Molly (Crista Alfaiate) is due to arrive. He boards a ship to Singapore, then a train to Bangkok -- it derails on the way, but still makes it -- and onwards to Saigon, Manila, Osaka and Chongqing. Molly, pursuing him, would repeat a more or less similar route.
Imagining Krabi
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 11/03/2020
» There's an archaeology of narrative in Krabi, 2562, a film by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers currently showing in select Bangkok cinemas. Layer upon layer, stratum upon stratum, dust on dust, it gives us a glimpse of how history, legend and biography is constructed. Like playful excavators, the two filmmakers peel off the palimpsest of a place and its people, real and imagined.
Space oddity
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 12/12/2018
» Parking curbs, in different colours, are arranged in a pattern in a gallery, which occupies a section of a parking space. In one corner of the room are seven cardboard boxes, which contain dozens of brown, slightly dog-eared log books, handwritten by security guards and caretakers of the National Gallery, dating back to the 1990s. Dry report on daily activities fill page after page. "5pm: closed room 1-4. 5.30pm, close the office. Midnight: new shift starts. Situation normal," reads an entry from March 1998.
Thai film to retell cave rescue drama
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 10/09/2018
» A Thai film retelling the story of the Tham Luang cave operation will start filming in November, said its director and producer.
Devotional aesthetics
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/02/2018
» Ustaz Suleiman dipped his brush in a bottle of ink and moved his hand over a piece of paper. His fingers nimble, his movement steady as if he was holding a breath, Suleiman drew a trellis of calligraphic elegance that spells the Thai name of our photographer in classical Arabic.