Clear your schedule for Bangkok's main film event: The World Film Festival of Bangkok, which returns next week for its 13th edition, with a buffet of over 50 movies showing at SF CentralWorld from Nov 13-22.
Festival director Kriangsak Silakong follows his favourite formula, championing small independent films -- from Thailand and Asia -- while sprinkling brand-name movies that are in current discussion into the mix. As is custom, he will also throw in a couple of vintage titles to give audiences a chance to watch these old films on the big screen instead of on DVDs, and this strategy also lends the festival a sense of historical reckoning within the glut of contemporary cinema.
I'll write more about the films and their show dates next week, but here are some of the highlights of the festival.
To start off, we toast the arrival of Arabian Nights, a three-volume Portuguese film. This is one of the most puzzling and highly-acclaimed films this year, a fact-fiction hybrid that surveys the impact of Portugal's economic sloth and austerity programme. It will be shown in three separate parts over three days, two hours for each part, and the director, Miguel Gomes, will be present as a guest of the festival.
Another big ticket is Dheepan, the Palme d'Or winner from this year's Cannes Film Festival. Directed by French director Jacques Audiard, the story follows an ex-Tamil insurgent who immigrates to Paris with a woman and a girl who pose as his family, only for them to be thrown into the midst of a gang war in the banlieue of the French capital.
Two more films from France: Marguerite & Julien is an amour fou story of incestuous siblings, set in the picturesque (and cruel) 18th century. Then we'll have The Search, a 2014 film by the Michel Hazanavicius, the director of the Oscar-winning The Artist. This one is a gritty story of an NGO worker and a lost boy set in the war zone of Chechnya. From the UK comes Suffragette, a female political drama starring Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep and Helena Bonham Carter.
The festival's opening night will see the Thailand premiere of Snap, a new film by Kongdej Jaturanrasmee. The Thai drama is billed as a romantic story -- about a wedding photographer and his old friend who's a military colonel's daughter -- set against the onset of the country's political instability.
Other titles from Asia include Ruined Heart: Another Love Story Between A Criminal And A Whore, a Rimbaud-esque romance set in a Filipino slum and starring Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano; from Malaysia is Men Who Saved The World, a religious satire and the country's representative to the Oscar this year; from Bangladesh is Under Construction, a Muslim woman's journey to claim what's rightfully hers; and from Taiwan is Almost Heaven, a domestic drama about a wife and the return of her long-lost husband.
What I also look forward to are classics. The festival will show two films by Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwanese master whose The Assassin is the most ravishing film of the year -- in Bangkok we will see his acclaimed early works A Time To Live, A Time To Die (1985), and Dust In The Wind (1987), both films are important milestones in the Taiwanese New Cinema movement. Another vintage title is Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, a 1963 film about a movie director and his wife, played by Brigitte Bardot.
The 13th World Film Festival of Bangkok runs from Nov 13-22 at SF World, CentralWorld.
See full schedule at www.worldfilmbkk.com.
Visit www.sfcinemacity.com to inquire about tickets.
