Thai Panorama at film fest

Details are firming up for the Bangkok International Film Festival, which has a pretty good summary of the titles its showing on the website.

The big news is that ticketing this year will be handled by Ticketmaster, which seems like a good idea. With the festival spread out over six theaters, getting tickets in past years was a bitch. If this new system works, it'll be possible to book the tickets online with one phone call or visit to a Ticketmaster booth.

Some huge titles are due to be shown, including Lost in Translation, 21 Grams, Dogville, Bertolucci's The Dreamers and Takeshi Kitano's Zaitoichi.

There's some major-studio crap as well, including Radio, Runaway Jury and The Missing. What are these films are doing in a festival?

But, that's not to take away from the many, many great films that will be shown. One that is scheduled that I will go out of my way to see is Rithy Panh's S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.

And, since this is festival in Thailand, a lot of Thai films will be shown. Competing for a prize in the Asean Panorama category are Last Life in the Universe (just added), the Macabre Case of Prompirom, OK Baytong, The Overture and Fan Chan.

There will also be a non-competition Thailand Panorama category, featuring Fake, Anguilimala, Sema: Warrior of Ayutthaya, Beautiful Boxer, Bupparatree, Iron Ladies 2: The Early Years and The Omen.

The Omen, directed by one of the Pang Brothers, does not involve the son of Satan. Rather it stars the Thai boy band D2B. In the film, a fortune teller says one of whom might die. In a weird parallel, one of the band members Big was left comatose after a bad car wreck over the summer. Miraculously, he recovered though.

There will also be a chance to see several documentaries from the 1970s in the Thai Reality category, plus several programs of short films.