Thai cinema history

Was surfing about and stumbled upon an article by Lonely Planet's Joe Cummings (mirror) about the history of Thai cinema. Here's part of it:

Thailand began experimenting with film very early in the history of world cinema. Within five years of the Lumière brothers' historic first public film showing in 1895, Siam's Prince Sanbhassatra imported film-making equipment and began documenting the royal ceremonies of his elder brother, King Rama V.
In 1922, Hollywood director Henry MacRae was hired to direct the silent Nang Sao Suwan, which used Thai actors for all roles and was released in Thailand in 1924. The storyline followed the tribulations of a beautiful young Thai girl with too many suitors. Unfortunately no viewable print of this early film appears to have survived.

Bangkok Film kicked off the domestic film industry with the launch of the first Thai-directed silent movie, Chok Sorng Chan, in 1927. In Thailand, silent films proved to be more popular than talkies right into the 1960s, and as late as 1969 Thai studios were still producing them from 16mm stock. Perhaps partially influenced by India's famed masala movies (which gained a strong following in post-WWII Bangkok), film companies blended romance, comedy, melodrama, and adventure to give Thai audiences a little bit of everything.

The arrival of 35mm movies in Thailand around this same time brought with it a proliferation of modern cinema halls and a surge in movie-making. During this era, Thai films attracted more cinema-goers than nang farang (as the Thais called movies from Europe and America), and today many Thais consider the 60s to be a golden age of Thai cinema.

Over half of the approximately 75 films produced annually during this period starred the much-admired onscreen duo of actor Mit Chaibancha and actress Petchara Chaowaraj. One of the last and most famous films of the era was Mit-Petchara's Mon Rak Luk Thung, a musical rhapsodizing Thai rural life. The 1970 film played in Bangkok cinemas for a solid six months, its popularity spurred by the film's best-selling soundtrack album and Mit's accidental death while filming another Thai production, Insee Thong.