Songs of Rice hooping into Thai cinemas

My favorite film of 2014, The Songs of Rice (พลงของข้าว, Pleng Khong Kao), opens in a limited release in Thai cinemas on January 22.

Directed by Uruphong Raksasad and produced by Pimpaka Towira, The Songs of Rice is a joyous celebration of the often-lively (and even explosive) rites and festivities that accompany rice cultivation in Thailand. It premiered about a year ago at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it won the Fipresci Award, and made several other festival appearances. I saw it twice, at Salaya Doc and in Luang Prabang, and both times I was blown away by the film's gently building tempo and the vivid intensity of the images.

A documentary, it is the completion of a trilogy of farming films that Uruphong began with in 2005 with The Stories from the North, a collection of short stories from around his native Chiang Rai province. He followed that up with the ambitious documentary Agrarian Utopia, which followed two families growing rice by hand for a year on a small plot of land, also in Chiang Rai, way up in Thailand's North.

With The Songs of Rice, Uruphong starts out in that same location, but then moves further afield, travelling the length and breadth of the country as he documents religious ceremonies, beauty pageants, parades, communal food preparation, dancing and music. He covers the rocket festival in Yasothon in the Northeast, the buffalo races in Chonburi in the East and falls in with a travelling band of workers and their rice-harvesting spaceships in Roi Et.

Released by Extra Virgin, The Songs of Rice opens on January 22 in Bangkok's SF World Cinema at CentralWorld, and then spreads to other SF cinemas in the following weeks, hitting Chiang Mai's Maya on January 29 and Khon Kaen on February 5.

For more details, check the movie's Facebook page. There's also a trailer.