BEFF5: Uruphong Raksasad's Roy Tai Phrae

Roy Tai Phrae, a new short film by Uruphong Raksasad, is part of the Doco Loco: Thammachad Tumra/Nature's Recipe program at the 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival.

It will be shown at 6pm on Friday at the Alliance Francaise. The package is "an ethnographic program giving a taste of the diverse food traditions of Southeast Asia that could inspire the maintenance and revival of ancient knowledge."

Other films in the package are Pattanaphong Jatikaet's The Chameleon Hunt; Manu Luksch's and Mukul Patel's Aju J's New Year Feast - In the Year of the Fire Dog; Etta Säfve's North Sea: Low Tide (Ophelia); Jun Iwakawa's Harmonics (Fridge promo) and Rhino Ariefiansyah's Bisa Dèwèk – We can do it ourselves.

Special mention goes to Uli Westphal's and Kristin Cooper's Coleoptera, an animated short that in two minutes runs through silhouettes of beetles. The order Coleoptera contains up to 8 million species, which would take a very long time to go through. I forget exactly how long. Frame by frame, the short goes through as many of the bugs as possible in two minutes. Coleoptera was showing on a TV at a reception at Wednesday night's opening of BEFF5. I sat and watched it rather than mingle. And now I'm thinking about eating beetles.

Across town at the Esplanade Cineplex on Friday, there's a package of German shorts at 6pm in International Harvest - Introducing Berlin II with a talk by Mario Pfeifer and then International Harvest III - Variety Theatre with shorts from France, the US, UK and Belgium, closing with the 55-minute Singapore Gaga by Tan Pin Pin.

Uruphong's Roy Tae Phrae is also screening in the Learned Behavior program, which will have an encore screening at 2pm on Sunday at the Esplanade.

More information:

• www.project304.org/beff5
• www.myspace.com/beff5

(Cross-published at The Nation Weblog)