Eternity in the San Diego Asian Film Festival

Sivaroj Konsakul's Eternity (ที่รัก, Tee Rak) is finishing up its Bangkok run as part of the Extra Virgin Director's Screen Project on October 5 and heads back out on the festival circuit.

It'll be playing at the San Diego Asia Film Festival, which runs from October 20 to 28.

The festival synopsis says some nice things about it:

Wit has just brought his schoolteacher fiancé Koi to his rural home. In this quiet, rustic setting, under the tall trees and beneath the wooden awnings of Wit’s youth, the young couple falls in love. In some sense a paean to puppy love, Eternity captures in long, patient strokes the romanticism of floating down a river or rocking in a hammock with the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. Eternity is achingly romantic, but it’s as calm as a summer’s afternoon. Characters don’t have to proclaim their love to each other – it’s palpable in their gentle glances, in their playful asides, even in the way they breathe in the countryside air when together.

Bookending these scenes of youthful tenderness is a ghostly presence that stretches that innocence into infinity. The puzzle of the film, as its title suggests, is how to discover, in these everyday rhythms of life, a love that knows no end – that haunts, not to frighten, but to never let go. Director Sivaroj Kongsakul has worked with other Thai masters of artful romanticism (Pen-ek Rataranuang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul) and with this award-winning debut, emerges as perhaps the most romantic of all.

Eternity also recently screened at the Riga International Film Festival, a.k.a. The Arsensals, where it was reviewed by Fipresci jurist Alison Frank at The Moving Arts. Head on over and have a look.

If you're in Bangkok, it's not too late to catch Eternity at SF World Cinema at CentralWorld, in nightly screenings at 7 plus Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2.45. Its run ends on October 5.

(Via Asia Pacific Arts)