Japanese disaster and Golden Slumbers at the 2nd Salaya Doc fest

The second edition of the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival is set for March 20 to 25 at the Thai Film Archive's Sri Salaya Theatre in Salaya, Nakhon Pathom, opening with 311, a documentary by veteran filmmaker Tatsuya Mori on the aftermath of last year's earthquake in Japan.

Mori will also be among the filmmakers leading workshops for filmmakers. Others taking part will be Nguyen Trinh Thi from the Hanoi Doclab and Urupong Raksasad, director of Agrarian Utopia.

Also on the opening day will be a look at Thailand's big disaster of last year, Under/Water/Dog, a short by Nuttorn Kungwanklai about controversial volunteer efforts to help dogs stranded by the floods.

The closing film on March 25 will be Golden Slumbers, a documentary on the lost films of Cambodia's golden age of cinema by Davy Chou. It previously screened at the Lifescapes festival in Chiang Mai and is part of a resurgence in interest about Cambodian films that has picked up in recent weeks thanks to the screening of some Khmer classics at the Berlin film festival. The Bangkok Post had a story about that, plus a profile of Cambodian leading lady Dy Saveth. There's also more at the Southeast Asian Film Studies Institute.

Other films will include The Cheer Ambassadors, about the first Thai team to participate in the World Cheerleading Championships. The Wall Street Journal's Southeast Asia Real Time blog has more on that.

There's also an ASEAN documentary competition with entries from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Burma and Indonesia.

And there's a seminar on March 26 and 27 at the Sri Salaya, organized by the Film Archive in collaboration with the DocNet Southeast Asia project of the Goethe-Institut and the Thai Film Foundation, “Finding Neverland for Southeast Asian Documentary”, with panels on such topics as film funding, censorship and distribution.

Some of the films will be repeated on March 31 and April 1 at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.

Check out the Salaya Doc blog for more details.