Three's A Treat

Three's A Treat

A preview of three film festivals of various flavours taking place in January

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Three's A Treat

We open the year with an unusual occurrence in the cinema-going sphere: This month there will be three film festivals slated to satisfy the thirst and curiosity of local audiences. Two of them are taking place in the cultural stronghold of Bangkok, while the other has come up with the strange choice of Hua Hin. Two of them will feature alternative cinema of vastly diverse temperaments, while the other sticks mostly with munchy fares from across Asia. All of them, luckily, are privately funded.

As the fate of the Bangkok International Film Festival _ the country's "official" movie event bankrolled by the government _ remains doubtful, with its last edition in 2009, it's worth noting the enthusiasm of non-government parties, through various sponsors and shoestring budgets, to put together showcases of films that would have otherwise gone unseen on the big screen. The purposes of the three film festivals this month vary from intellectual expedition on one end to tourism brochure on the other, and their eventual benefits to local viewers, as either cultural nourishment or colourful spectacles, may be hard to gauge. Still, the trio keeps the wheel turning and expands the possibility of movie-going experience _ until the government can decide if it's time to stop wasting our strategic opportunity as leader in the Southeast Asian film scene and give us a worthy "official" film festival. If we still need one.

Turin Horse

The 9th World Film Festival of Bangkok

Date: Jan 20 to 27
Venue: Paragon Cineplex

Plot: Through the virtue of consistency, the World Film Festival of Bangkok has become a yearly cinefest anxiously awaited for by movie-goers. Originally, it was supposed to take place Nov last year, but the flood fear and generally grim mood of late prompted the organisers to postpone it to this month. A wise choice in retrospect, but what we're curious now is whether the colourful festival director, Kriangsak "Victor" Silakong, will put together another edition at its usual slot this November.

Highlight: The World Film Festival of Bangkok will serve up around 70 titles, both short and feature-length, and they're divided into the usual categories of Cine Latino, Music and Dance A La Carte, Doc Feast, Cinema Beat, Asian Contemporary. Some of the highlights will include: Bela Tarr's Turin Horse, a black-and-white cinema-poem based on the anecdote about Neitzsche's encounter with a horse _ it will be the first time that Bangkok audiences will see a film by Bela Tarr, one of the most unique film-makers at work in the world, on the big screen. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a dark and mysterious policier, has been ranked one of the best films of 2011 by a number of magazines. Lovely Man is an Indonesian drama about a 19-year-old devout Muslim who discovers that her long lost father is a transvestite working on the streets of Jakarta. Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D is Werner Herzog's film that takes us to explore the Chauvet Cave in southern France, where men painted the world's oldest pictures 32,000 years ago.

Lovely Man

The Lady

Hua Hin International Film Festival

Date: Jan 26-29
Venue: Major Cineplex Hua Hin,
Vic Hua Hin

Plot: Why Hua Hin? Well, why not? On paper, the host of this brand-new event is the Federation of National Film Association, the official body of local film studios. Although it's clear that the real key man is Suwat Liptapanlop, the politician and businessman who visited Cannes last year and now wishes to test the potential of our seaside town as a major cinema gathering. The festival was planned rather quickly, with an air of improvisation, and while rumours about visiting A-list stars (including Jude Law) has swirled for nearly a month now, the organisers are still unable to confirm many of the details, including the final list of films to be showcased.

Hua Hin has a multiplex and an aura of classic, highbrow destination _ at least to Bangkok vacationers _ but does the place have an audience? Will movie-goers from Bangkok go to the trouble of driving down there for a weekend of films? The festival will step up its promotion efforts from this week onwards, and is likely to fly in industry people, mostly from around the Asean region, to pump up the vibe of the nascent, unheard-of event. To develop a place into a major cinema destination requires long-term commitment, and the men behind the Hua Hin festival will have to answer whether they're ready for that. Otherwise, it will be a one-time fireworks display that leaves no impression.

Highlight: The festival will concentrate on Asian films. Altogether, there will be around 30 films, including Thai films from the past year. The original idea isn't badly conceived: The festival will show films that were box-office champions in several countries, plus films that represent those nations in the race for Oscar's best foreign language film. The final list of the film, however, may not stick to that. But so far, it's likely we'll see Aung San Suu Kyi's biopic, The Lady (which will open in cinemas anyway); the Korean drama Always; the box-office sensation from Taiwan, Seediq Bale: Warriors of the Rainbow; and the critically-acclaimed Ways of the Sea, from the Philippines.

The 6th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival

Date: Jan 28, 29 and Feb 4, 5
Venue: Bangkok Art & Culture Centre

Plot: It's back. The Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, which happens _ on average _ every two years, has acquired a cultish following, given its strong dedication to avant-garde cinema from the first edition a dozen years ago. This year, the venue being BACC (where many symposiums will also take place) should fulfil the purpose of expanding the audience base and invite people to sample that mysterious allure of experimental, non-narrative cinema.

Highlight: A tasty buffet for cinephiles under the theme "Raiding the Archives: Over the Past 12 Months", a team of volunteer programmers have visited film archives in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Britain, Thailand. They pored over thousands of audio-visual material to pick clips, movies and images, and have created programmes that "capture histories at the margins, and encourage viewers to look anew at history via discovering details in the images' frame". The programming is clearly an attempt to merge the archival trove of experimental cinema with historical re-examination.

There are also special contributions from artists groups and independent artists' cinema archives in Southeast Asia, Europe and New Zealand, including the KL Experimental Film Festival (Klex) and Hanoi Doc Lab. Then there are rare programmes of pioneering female amateur film-makers in New Zealand, who took up 16mm cinematography in the late 1920s and '30s, as well as experimental archives from Latin America, East Asia, Austria and the UK. Beff 6 will also screen a documentary partly made in Thailand in 1953 for Unesco entitled World Without End (1953), which captures with unique lyricism a landscape on the brink of modernisation.

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