Film fest tix in hand!

I made it to the Ticketmaster counter just before she closed up tonight to book my seats for the films I want to see at the Bangkok International Film Festival.

Among my choices are Fake and Rithy Panh's S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.

It'll be interesting to see how this deal works. This is the first year the film festival has tried a centralised ticketing system. In previous years, you had to go around to the half dozen or so different theaters and buy the tickets - if they were on sale. Very often, the schedule was delayed until the last possible second, making it impossible to book advance seats.

Even worse, the festivals always allotted blocks of seating to corporate sponsors - who never showed up to claim them. The computer system in the theater lobby would show a full auditorium when in reality the house was half empty because the corporate types were out playing golf or singing karaoke - not watching some foreign arthouse flick. Meanwhile, the filmgoers were left to fume because they could not get a ticket. There are ways around this problem. Hopefully, they have been found this year.

My choices in films were made on the basis of when I have free time, as well as my desire to see the film, weighed against the future likelihood of the film showing up in local theaters on wide release or on cheap DVDs.

In three years of living in Bangkok, this will be the fourth "Bangkok Film Festival" I've attended. This does not count smaller film series like the Big Little Film Project, which screens independent films; the British Film Festival, the EU Film Festival and the Japanese Film Festival, which are sponsored by the various embassies. In all, it means I'll have a pretty good chance of seeing some films I would never dream of being able to see otherwise.

It's definitely not the most important festival in the world. A good overview of that is provided by the Bangkok Post's film writer Kong Rithee. He also has a lot of background on the running of the festival by the Tourism Authority of Thailand. For as long as the link lasts until it expires due to The Post's new subscriber-only archive system, you can find it here.

Bangkok isn't even in the first tier of cities for most wide release films. So movies that showed and have disappeared from theaters in the US have yet to show up here. This is, after all, a relatively small, "third world" country.

Back to that four festivals in just three years. When I moved here in 2001, what was then just called the Bangkok Film Festival was held in the fall and was sponsored by the newspaper I work for, The Nation. It was pretty low key and had possibly only one or two "big ticket" films that were up for major awards.

Then in 2002, the person who had run the festivals in the years before wanted to come back in. He had been sidelined by a bicycling accident in 2001, which left The Nation free to run the event. Anyway, he took his operation over to the competing paper, the Bangkok Post. His Bangkok Film Festival was a flop, though, as it was plagued by the usual organisational hassles and films that were held up in customs.

So in early 20032, The Nation put together The Bangkok International Film Festival. The chief sponsor was the Tourism Authority of Thailand, which levered the operation of the festival away so it could use it to promote tourism and film culture. With all the government types involved, the officiousness and ceremoniality of the affair grew as well, with red-carpet events, foreign celebrities and exclusive premiere screenings for VIPs only.

This really turned off The Nation bosses, so they started up their own festival, the World Film Festival of Bangkok, which was held late last year. It billed itself as a "festival for film lovers" and aimed for a younger, hipper, slicker and cooler crowd by having fashion shows and short-film contests sponsored by the phone company, Hutch. The result wasn't too bad, if you ignored the stupid fashion shows and the five-minute videos people shot with their Hutch phone cameras. Most notable was a huge retrospective of Werner Herzog's films.

This brings us to the present "2nd annual" International festival, which again is being run by the TAT with the intention of ramming packaged tourism and film culture, red-carpet affairs, foreign celebrities and exclusive VIP screenings down our throats.

But enough of that for now. I have my tickets and I'm looking forward to sitting back in the theater and enjoying what should be some really, really great films!