The schedule has been completed for the fourth Salaya International Documentary Film Festival, which runs from March 22 to 29 at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya, Nakhon Pathom and from March 25 to 28 and on March 30 at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.
Highlights include the Thai premieres for the Rotterdam award-winner The Songs of Rice and the Oscar-nominated Best Foreign Language Film The Missing Picture.
The opening film will be At Berkeley, a brand-new work by documentarian Frederic Wiseman. Running for four hours, it chronicles the debate over tuition increases and budget cuts at the University of California at Berkeley.
The Songs of Rice, the latest feature by Agrarian Utopia director Urupong Raksasad, will be the closing film. It was among a big crop of Thai films at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it made its world premiere and was given the Fipresci Award.
The Missing Picture, the first Foreign Language Film nominee for Cambodia at the Academy Awards, is the latest work by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh to examine the legacy of the Khmer Rouge. It combines archival footage and uses clay figures of his vanished family members in a bid to reconstruct fading memories. It makes its Thai premiere in a special screening.
Another special screening will be Receiving Torpedo Boat (การรับเรือตอร์ปิโด), 1935 footage by Luang Kolakarn Jan-Jit (Pao Wasuwat) about Royal Thai Marines going to Italy to acquire a torpedo boat. The film was added last year to the Registry of Films as National Heritage.
The Director in Focus this year is Kazuhiro Soda, with screenings of two of his films, Campaign 1 and Campaign 2
๊ื
There will also be a selection of UK-produced documentaries co-presented by the British Council – Rough Aunties, Requiem for Detroit, Moving to Mars and Soundtrack for a Revolution.
Entries from Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam have been selected for the festival's Asean Documentary Competition.
Two of them are by Thai indie filmmakers – Sivaroj Kongsakul and Wichanon Sumumjarn.
In Homeland, Sivaroj continues on the themes he explored in his semi-autobiographical debut feature, 2010’s family drama Eternity (Tee-Rak). The 23-minute documentary is about a schoolteacher who, after 36 years of instructing first-grade pupils, hopes to own her own home before she dies.
Wichanon, who made his feature debut with the semi-autobiographical documentary-drama In April the Following Year There was a Fire, looks at a young Isaan lass as she takes a job as a product presenter in Pretty Woman Walking Down the Street.
From Myanmar, Aung Nwai Htway dissects his parents’ marriage in Behind the Screen. His folks were film icons in 1960s Myanmar, but today Htway struggles to reconcile those glamorous images with the painful memories of his parents’ divorce.
The Cambodian entry Red Wedding looks at a legacy of the Khmer Rouge, which forced some 250,000 women into marriages. Directed by Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon and produced by Rithy Panh, Red Wedding tells the story of Sochan, who at the age of 16 was forced into a marriage with a soldier who raped her. After 30 years of silence, she brought her case to the international tribunal in Phnom Penh.
Another Asean neighbour’s past is unearthed in To Singapore, With Love by Tan Pin Pin. Her controversial film features interviews with the country’s political exiles.
The past also lingers in the Vietnamese entry, Mrs Bua’s Carpet, in which director Duong Mong Thu goes looking for memories and traces of war in Danang.
And Jazz in Love by Filipino filmmaker Baby Ruth Villarama centres on cross-cultural romance as it looks at a young Filipino named Jazz as he awaits the arrival of his fiance, a middle-aged German man.
Hit the following link to download the schedule.
(Via The Nation)
No comments:
Post a Comment