Guest post: Wrapping up Filmart 2016

Booths at Filmart. Photo by Keith Barclay.

Keith Barclay is editor of the New Zealand film industry publication Screenz. A sponsored journalist covering Filmart, he offers Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal tailored coverage of Filmart, the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum and the Asian Film Awards.

Hong Kong's Filmart wrapped on March 17. With 800 exhibitors and 7,300 registered buyers, the event set a new attendance record on the occasion of its 20th edition. It's a long way from the 75 invited exhibitors who took part in the inaugural 1997 event. Filmart is Asia's largest entertainment market event by some distance. Depending how it's measured, it's one of the world's top three or top five.

Strongly supported over the years by Hong Kong's own production and distribution community, a solid core of Thai distributors has been doing business there for several years. There are also several distributors from elsewhere carrying Thai product as part of a broader offer.

The most prominent Thai distributors at this year's Filmart were Five Star and Mono, each carrying a catalog of the more commercial Thai fare – mostly horrors, comedies and romantic comedies. Mono presented a large amount of its TV product as part of its offer. Both stands were busy during the market.

Five Star had Achira Nokthet's Ghost Ship (มอญซ่อนผี, Mon Son Phee) and Surussavadi Chuarchart's F.Hilaire (ฟ.ฮีแลร์), both released in Thai cinemas last year. Also in Five Star's catalogue, although a little older, was Issara Nadee's 2012 feature 407 Dark Flight. Thailand's first 3D horror feature, it has other Hong Kong connections having been shot by another of Filmart's regular exhibitors, Percy Fung's Hong Kong-based 3D Magic.

Representing the Thai government, the Thailand Film Office was one of a number of film offices from the region looking to attract business, productions looking to shoot in Asian locations or use services in the region. This year, the Thai team had a number of bites at the cherry with two umbrella organisations specializing in film attraction also exhibiting. AFCNet, the Asian organisation formed out of the worldwide International Association of Film Commissioners (AFCI) had a stand, as did Film Asean which, as it says on the box, represents the interests of the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Film Asean arrived in Hong Kong having made a good splash at its launch at the Berlinale's European Film Market in February.

The organization has been in development for four years, and has set both outward and inward-facing goals. In Southeast Asia, Film Asean will offer services including a touring mini-festival to introduce films from other countries in the region to regional audiences. For industry members, it will also support training and upskilling initiatives to help develop each country's own production capability and to better service the (usually more lucrative) inbound productions.

In 2013 Thailand introduced its own initiative to increase awareness of the country's potential and attract more inbound production. In the face of improving incentive schemes offered by other countries' governments, the Thailand International Film Destination Festival focused on promoting international titles shot in Thailand. Over the years, many of those titles have used Thailand to double for another part of Asia – most frequently Vietnam for a spate of Hollywood war films from Casualties of War to The Deer Hunter.

More recent high-profile titles such as The Hangover and Xu Zheng's Lost in Thailand might help drive awareness of what Thailand has to offer but, as neighbor Malaysia has discovered at the Pinewood Iskandar studios, it's not all about the blockbusters. Often the longer-running, lower-profile international titles – especially TV shows – keep people working week in and week out and create better opportunities for developing crew members' skills.

As well as distributors selling product at Filmart, production service companies also promote their services. Thai post-production and visual-effects specialists Yggdrazil and Kantana were both present. While Yggdrazil is probably better known internationally for its work in advertising, Kantana has been well-known in Hong Kong for several years, not least for its work on Wong Kar-Wai's Cannes-premiered 2046.

Other Thai post houses also present in Hong Kong were G2D (the former Technicolor facility in Bangkok) and White Light, which presented prizes at the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum, which ran alongside Filmart. Sway director Rooth Tang's March April May was among the projects selected for this year's HAF.

Both events form part of the umbrella Hong Kong Entertainment Expo, which draws to a close this weekend with the presentation of the Hong Kong Film Awards and the end of the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Thai titles playing in this year's HKIFF were Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour, well-travelled since its Cannes premiere 10 months ago, and The Island Funeral by Pimpaka Towira, which won the Best Asian Future Film Award at last year's Tokyo International Film Festival.

Both directors' previous features, Apichatpong's Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Pimpaka's One Night Husband respectively, also played in past editions of the Hong Kong fest.

Filmart (14 – 17 March) ran as part of the Hong Kong Entertainment Expo, along with film financing forum/project market HAF (14 – 16 March), and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (21 March – 4 April).

Festival, festival! Island in Rotterdam and Goteborg, General in Berlin, plus Motel and Executioner

One of the cleaner scenes I can use from Motel Mist.

Pimpaka Towira is on a victory lap of the festival circuit, following her Asian Future Award win at the Tokyo International Film Festival last year, with her latest feature The Island Funeral  (มหาสมุทรและสุสาน, Maha Samut Lae Susaan).

She’s joined the seasonal migration of Thai indie filmmakers, who each winter fly to such frigid northern cities as Rotterdam, Berlin and Goteborg, Sweden, where they are mated with funding, awards and critical acclaim. They then return to Thailand, where they further propagate the species.

In addition to the Bright Future section at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Pimpaka will show The Island Funeral in Goteborg, where it is in competition for the Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award. Like Tokyo’s Asian Future Award, the Bergman prize is for filmmakers making their first or second feature, and Island Funeral, which is Pimpaka’s second drama film and has been eight years in the making, definitely qualifies. The Goteborg fest runs until February 8.

Starring Actors’ Studio-trained Heen Sasithorn, The Island Funeral is a road movie, covering the journey of a young Bangkok woman and her friends into the heart of Thailand’s restive Deep South.

Pimpaka might also be on the road to the Berlin International Film Festival, where to prove she has enough love in her heart to spread around, she has Prelude to the General, a short that that is spun from one of her many spinning plates, a work-in-progress feature called The General’s Secret (Kam Lub Khong Nai Phol), which she offered at the Thai Pitch in Cannes in 2013.

Perhaps she’ll stop by the Berlinale Talents Campus, where she’s a 2005 alumnae, and run into a few young filmmakers who look up to her as a mentor, including Thai indie director Sorayos “Minimal” Prapapan and Korean-American director Josh Kim, who broke into the Thai film industry last year with his debut feature How to Win at Checkers (Every Time), which garnered much acclaim when it premiered in Berlin last year. The Berlin fest runs from February 11 to 21.

Back in Rotterdam, Thai producer-director Anocha Suwichakornpong has arrived after a flight delayed by a psychotic passenger and a dented aircraft door kept her on the ground overnight in Warsaw. She’s there to be part of the jury for the Hivos Tiger Awards, of which she’s a past winner, for “Mundane History” in 2010. Rotterdam has been most kind to Thai films in past years, with other winners being Aditya Assarat with Wonderful Town in 2008, Sivaroj Kongsakul with Eternity in 2011 and Jakrawal Nilthamrong's Vanishing Point last year.

Among the entries to gander at this year will be Motel Mist, the debut feature of Prabda Yoon. A SEA Write Award-winning novelist, Prabda is best known in the movie world as the screenwriter of Pen-ek Ratanruang’s trippy 2003 classic Last Life in the Universe. His Motel Mist appears to be another existential freak-out, luridly taking place in the rooms of the Motel Mistress, an alien-looking love motel in Bangkok.

“Motel Mist was a film born out of a mixture of inspiration and frustration, but it was completed with great trust and support from a group of talented and devoted lovers of the cinematic art,” Prabda says in a press release from Thai film distributor Mosquito Films. “The film is about ‘otherness’ and ‘dislocation’ but the experience of making it has ironically given me the sense of acceptance and belonging. It’s been a very delightful and meaningful exercise.”

And if that’s not enough wonderful Thai weirdness for Rotterdam festival-goers, they can feast eyes on Painting with History in a Room Filled with People with Funny Names 3, a short film by artist Korakrit Arunanondchai that blends denim, drones and body paint. A crocodile is in the mix as well.

There's another Thai film in Rotterdam as well, but I will refrain from naming it.

In other festival news, director Tom Waller is continuing to win awards with his 2014 feature The Last Executioner, a biopic of Thai prison guard and executioner Chavoret Jaruboon. At the Dhaka International Film Festival recently, Waller was awarded Best Director, while Executioner leading man Vithaya Pansringarm shared the Best Actor prize with Iraqi’s Mahmoud Abu Abbas, who won for Samt Al Rai (Silence of the Shepherd), a slow-burn thriller by Raad Moshatat.

The Last Executioner was notably snubbed for the Thai film industry’s Subhanahongsa Awards last year, but won screenplay and best picture in the Surasawadee Awards, the long-running movie honors that’s also known as the Tukata Tong or Golden Doll Awards.

There is much more to report on the festival scene. Please be patient while I slowly catch up.

(Cross-published in The Nation; print only)

In Thai cinemas: Awasarn Loke Suay, Krasue Kreung Khon

The year in Thai cinema commences with Awasarn Loke Suay (อวสานโลกสวย), a teen-oriented psychological drama from Kantana Motion Pictures.

Apinya Sakuljaroensuk stars as a faded Internet idol who becomes upset at being unseated by a new schoolgirl star (Napasasi Surawan). She decides to teach the naive upstart a lesson in cruelty. Pun Homcheun and Onusa Donsawai direct, adapting a short film of the same name.

In a gimmick to gin up publicity, there are two versions – rated 18+ and the “uncut” 20-

And there's another Thai film to start 2016 – veteran actor-director Bin Banluerit's horror-comedy
Krasue Kreung Khon (กระสือครึ่งคน) – which has a jungle tribe of dwarfs being terrorized by the notorious krasue, the female ghost of Southeast Asian folklore that’s a floating vampiric head and entrails. It's a mainstream release, from Sahamongkol.



New releases in Thai cinemas this week include the Oscar-nominated 45 Years from upstart indie distributor HAL Film, which made its debut last year with the release of the offbeat foreign indies White God and The Tribe. And, oddly, the Documentary Club is releasing a dramatic feature, that iPhone movie", Tangerine. Shows the possibilities for doc filmmaking, I suppose.

Upcoming events to mention include the Bangkok Art and Culture Center's Cinema Diverse: Directors' Choice series, which wraps up on February 6 with a screening of the Chilean drama No hosted by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand's most-celebrated filmmaker. He and film critic Kong Rithdee will talk about the movie afterward, with translation in English. Registration opens at 4.30pm with seating on a first-come, first-served basis.

Still more events this year include the Goethe-Institut and Thai Film Archive's Wim Wenders Retrospective, which will include Wings of Desire outdoors at Lumpini Park in February and a 3D screening of Pina at the Archive in March. There's also the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival in March, the Archive's travelling Memories fest in April, the Silent Film Festival of Thailand in June and the Thai Short Film and Video Festival in August.

Festival festival (and awards)! Ferris Wheel spins in Singapore, Checkers goes Golden, Keetarajanipon applauded in Hawaii

Ferris Wheel (ชิงช้าสวรรค์, Ching Chaa Sawan), a short film by up-and-coming indie filmmaker Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, won a special mention at the Singapore International Film Festival, which wrapped up yesterday.

An entry in the Singapore fest's Silver Screen Awards Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, Ferris Wheel follows a migrant woman from Myanmar and her young son as they navigate the border areas. There is an altercation in a gas station's convenience store, depicting the unfriendly attitudes of some Thais toward the migrants, and the mum and boy are separated. The kid is attracted to a nearby carnival by a man in a monkey costume, leading to panic by the mother.

Ferris Wheel premiered at the Busan International Film Festival as part of the Color of Asia – Newcomers program. Apichatpong Weerasethakul was a mentoring counterpart in the Color of Asia – Masters line-up with his own short, Vapour.

The Color of Asia project was initiated by China's Youku video-sharing website and Heyi Pictures, which on the strength of Ferris Wheel picked Phuttiphong to make a feature film. He'll be doing Departure Day, a project that previously won support from the Busan fest's Asian Cinema Fund.

Ferris Wheel will next head to France, where it's been selected for February's Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, which is the biggest and most prestigious short-film fest in the world.

I've actually seen Ferris Wheel, and it's powerful stuff, especially the haunting close-ups of the faces of Myanmar migrants spinning into frame as they ride a Ferris wheel. It was screened as a special treat for movie-goers who braved sleazy confines of the decrepit Laem Thong Theatre for the Bangkok premiere of Jakrawal Nilthamrong's Vanishing Point.

Other Thai shorts in the rebooted Singapore fest's line-up this year were Night Watch by Danaya Chulputhipong, which previously won an award in Rio de Janeiro and Sivaroj Kongsakul's Our,from the 19th Thai Short Film and Video Fest.

Thai features in the Singapore fest were Apichatpong's Cemetery of Splendour (which had an accompanying video-art installation) and the Thai Oscar entry How to Win at Checkers (Every Time).

And that leads me to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's Golden Globe Awards, which have put How to Win at Checkers on its list of possible nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. This is the first I've heard of the Globes' foreign-film submissions being made public before the final shortlist of five actual nominees are announced, which leads to questions. Have any Thai films been submitted to the HFPA in past years? Also, who submits the foreign films?

Finally, here's one more item for this edition of "Festival festival!" Keetarajanipon, the short-film omnibus that is inspired by musical compositions of His Majesty the King, won an audience award at the recent Hawaii International Film Festival. That's according to IndieWire and Film Business Asia. News of the award came as the film was on a revival run in Thai cinemas, screening over the weekend as part of celebrations for His Majesty the King's 88th birthday and Thai Fathers' Day. Keetarajanipon has well made, highly polished devotional segments by Nonzee Nimibutr, Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, Parkpoom Wongpoom and Wallop Prasopphol. More festival appearances are scheduled, including next year's East Winds Film Festival.

Arnold Is a Model Student gets high marks from Hubert Bals

Sorayos Prapapan at the premiere of Vanishing Point at the Laem Thong Theatre in Klong Toey, Bangkok. Photo via Vanishing Point.

Sorayos Prapapan, an indie filmmaker who has made short films and has served on the crews of many indie features, has received a boost from the Rotterdam festival's Hubert Bals Fund for what could be his directorial feature debut, Arnold Is a Model Student.

Announced yesterday by the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sorayos' Arnold is among winners in the Hubert Bals Fund's Fall 2015 selection round for the Script and Project Development Grant.

Produced by Donsaron Kovitvanitcha, Arnold Is a Model Student was earlier pitched at the Ties That Bind workshop and last year's Produire au Sud Bangkok.

Sorayos, a graduate in film and photography from Thammasat University, has made critically acclaimed short films, among them the domestic-worker drama Boonrerm and the satiric Auntie Maam Has Never Had a Passport. Along with his short films, he has been a fixture on the festival and workshop circuit in recent years, attending Generation Campus 2013 in Moscow and the Asian Film Academy 2013 in Busan, among others.

He was a production assistant on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cannes Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and has been a sound department hand on other films, including Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's 36. He also worked on Jakrawal Nilthamrong's Rotterdam prize-winner Vanishing Point, for which he did foley work.

Cemetery of Splendour wins Best Feature at Asia Pacific Screen Awards

Presenters Sofie Formica and Anthony Chen at the ninth Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Brisbane. Photo courtesy of APSA.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's much-acclaimed latest feature Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น, Rak Ti Khon Kaen) was named best feature film at the ninth Asia Pacific Screen Awards on Thursday night in Brisbane.

It's the second time a Thai film has won an award at the APSAs, an Australia-based ceremony that was first held in 2007. The awards recognize and promote cinematic excellence and cultural diversity of the world’s fastest-growing film region, which comprises 70 countries and areas, 4.5 billion people and is responsible for half of the world’s film output. In 2015, 39 films from 22 Asia Pacific countries and areas received APSA nominations.

Thailand's previous APSA winner was Uruphong Raksasad's Agrarian Utopia, which won the Unesco Award in 2009. A third Thai film, the documentary Citizen Juling, was also a nominee in 2009.

The full list of this year's winners can be found at the APSA website.

Cemetery of Splendour premiered to much acclaim in the Un Certain Regard section of this year's Cannes Film Festival. It has been a fixture on the circuit since then, with appearances that include the London film fest and the Pancevo Film Festival, where it shared the Lighthouse Award with Flotel Europa.

Closest Splendour is coming to Thailand this year appears to be the Singapore International Film Festival. Prospects for a Thai screening are uncertain or even unlikely, according to various interviews with the director.

Festival festival! Masters and Newcomers in Busan, premieres in Tokyo and Taipei, an award in Rio

The autumn film festival season is upon us, with Thai films highlighted in Busan, Tokyo and Taipei. I also have an item from late in the summer, of an award in Rio.

The Busan International Film Festival gets underway on Thursday, paying tribute to the masters of Asian cinema.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul will of course be taking part in that. He's among the festival's "Top 10 directors" and was also among the experts polled for the fest's "Asian Cinema 100", listing the 100 best Asian films of all time. The top 10 (actually 11) will screen at the fest.

And Apichatpong's latest feature, Cemetery of Splendour will screen at Busan as part of the Window on Asian Cinema. Splendour has been on a tear since taking the Cannes Film Festival by storm back in May, recently playing in Toronto and in New York.

Apichatpong also contributed to a new collection of short films for the Busan fest, Color of Asia – Masters, along with Naomi Kawase, Wang Xiaoshuai and Im Sang-soo. Apichatpong's short is called Vapour, "a lyrical piece absent of any dialogue". There's a trailer embedded below.



Busan also highlights newer talents with another shorts compilation, Color of Asia – Newcomers. Up-and-coming indie filmmaker Phuttiphong Aroonpheng is behind the segment titled Ferris Wheel, about a migrant-worker mother and her son attending a rural carnival and encountering a creepy stranger in a monkey costume. Again, there's a trailer for that one, and it's embedded below.



Beyond Splendour and the short films, Busan also has a couple of Thai documentaries. There is Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's talking-head parade The Master, which has Thai film luminaries reminiscing about Mr. Van, the guy who briefly ruled Bangkok's pirate-movie scene in the days before bittorrent. It was shopped at last year's Asian Project Market.

Aditya Assarat also looks into the Thai movie-going scene with The Scala, a 52-minute piece about Bangkok's endangered landmark Scala cinema. The link on the BIFF website sent me in a circle back to the homepage, so I turned to the director for help. He provided me with a PDF that details the Power of Asian Cinema project of the Korean Broadcast System and the Busan fest, which brought together 10 Asian directors to make documentaries for South Korean TV. All 10 will be shown during the festival. Aditya's short recalls his memories of the Scala. Here's the synopsis:

I always like to watch movies at The Scala. It reminds me of my childhood when all the cinemas in Bangkok were standalone cinemas. At the time, I never thought it was anything special. But now that I am older, I have become nostalgic. There are many things about it I wanted to document: the staff, who are all old now, the space, which is very beautiful, and the ideal, of movie-watching as a special event. In a way, The Scala is similar to all of us who persevere, despite the difficulties, to celebrate cinema in the way we remember it to be.

The Scala opened its doors in 1970. It had one thousand seats and every night, they were filled. In those days, going to the movies was something special. The cinema was a place where people got dressed up, went on dates, and fell in love. But today, everything has changed. There is a multiplex in every mall and the young generation watch movies on their phone. But at The Scala, time has stood still. The cinema is still run by many of the same staff who have been there from the beginning. It is now the last remaining standalone cinema left in Bangkok. And soon, its time will come to an end too.

Next up is the Tokyo International Film Festival, which has two world premieres of Thai films, Kongdej Jaturanrasamee's Snap and Pimpaka Towira's The Island Funeral (มหาสมุทรและสุสาน, Maha Samut Lae Susaan).

Part of Tokyo fest's main competition, Snap is a romantic drama produced by TrueVisions and is set against a period of martial law in Thailand. It stars newcomer actress Waruntorn Paonil as a young woman returning to her hometown for a friend's wedding. The wedding photographer (Toni Rakkaen) turns out to be a young man from her past.

Pimpaka's long-awaited second dramatic feature The Island Funeral is in the Asian Future program. A road drama, it features a screenplay by film critic and documentary filmmaker Kong Rithdee. Check out the trailer, embedded below.



Moving on to Taipei, there's the Golden Horse International Film Festival, which will open with Distance, an omnibus feature put together by Singapore's Anthony Chen, who made the Cannes' Camera d'Or winner Ilo Ilo. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Distance stars Taiwanese actors Chen Bolin and Yo Yang alongside Hong Kong star Paul Chun. "The experimental drama sees Chen play three separate roles in each of three stories, separately helmed by Xin Yukun, Tan Shijie and Sivaroj Kongsakul. The directors hail, respectively, from China, Singapore and Thailand."

Sivaroj is the maker of tear-jerking sentimental short films as well as the emotional drama Tee Rak (Eternity), which was a prize-winner at Rotterdam and other fests.

Finally, here's some award news, which a reader gave me a tip on – Night Watch, a short film by Danaya Chulphuthiphong won the Special Jury Prize at the Fronteira Festival in Rio de Janeiro in August. According to a review, the experimental short takes place during a coup d'etat and the unrest that accompanies it, as seen from scenes on the streets and through television images. Danaya previously served as a cinematographer on Endless, Nameless, which was the top-prize winner at last year's Thai Short Film and Video Festival..

And so ends my second "Festival festival!" round-up of festival news. Thai filmmakers, if you have film in an upcoming festival or won an award somewhere, please feel free to let me know.

Checkers jumps into place as Thailand's Oscars contender

The independent coming-of-age drama How to Win at Checkers (Every Time), a.k.a. P'Chai My Hero (พี่ชาย My Hero) has been chosen to represent Thailand in the 88th Academy Awards.

As announced today in a press release by the Federation of National Film Associations of Thailand, Checkers was picked by an eight-member committee that considered films released in Thai cinemas from October 1, 2014 to September 30 of this year.

Aside from Checkers, other titles that were pondered were the current hit romantic comedy Freelance, the just-released literary-classic adaptation Mae Bia (แม่เบี้ย, a.k.a. The Snake), the gay psychological thriller The Blue Hour (Onthakan, อนธการ), the time-travel comedy 2538 Alter Ma Jive (2538 อัลเทอร์มาจีบ) and the Catholic schoolteacher biographical drama F. Hilaire (ฟ.ฮีแลร์).

However, after much debate and analysis by the committee, it was decided that Checkers "transcended" the other choices, said Weerasak Kowsurat, the committee chairman.

The debut feature by Korean-American director Josh Kim, How to Win at Checkers (Every Time) is adapted from Sightseeing, the short story collection of noted Thai-American author Rattawut Lapcharoensap. The comedy-drama, set against the backdrop of class conflict in Thai society, centers on 11-year-old Oat, a poor orphan raised by his openly gay older brother Ek and their superstitious aunt. With Ek facing the upcoming military draft lottery, Oat takes a big risk to ensure his brother will not be conscripted.

Checkers premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and has made the rounds on the circuit. It was given the Thai title of P'Chai My Hero (literally My Brother, My Hero) for local release in July. It was produced by an international consortium of filmmakers from Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand and the US, including Thai director-producer Anocha Suwichakornpong.

The film federation's selection has a notable omission from this year's festival circuit, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour, which has garnered much acclaim since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and more recently in Toronto. However, it has not yet been released in Thailand. Apichatpong's previous feature, the 2010 Cannes Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, was submitted for the 83rd Academy Awards.

Checkers is the 22nd Thai entry in the Oscars race for Best Foreign Language Film, which Thailand has taken part in since 1984. None have made the short-list of nominees.

Art review: Chulayarnnon Siriphol's Behind the Painting

If Chulayarnnon Siriphol's Behind the Painting were a mechanical drawing, the current art exhibition of his short film would be the "exploded view", as it's broken up, magnified and detailed on more than a dozen screens across four galleries at the Silpakorn University Art Center in Bangkok.

It's also a refreshing approach to interpreting classical literature, as Behind the Painting is yet another one of those Thai stories that has over the decades been repeatedly adapted for film, television and stage.

Written by Sri Burapha, Behind the Painting is very much a product of 1930s Thailand, following the country's adoption of the constitutional monarchy, which gave rise to the different-thinking educated middle class of today. The romantic tragedy, set in Japan, centers on a young Thai man studying there. The student Nopporn is contacted by a family acquaintance, an elderly Japanese gentleman who is coming home with his new wife Kirati, a younger Thai woman of noble birth. He wants Nopporn to squire Kirati around and help her adjust to life in Japan. Naturally, unrequited romance develops between the two young people.

Chulayarnnon is one of those Thai filmmakers whose work is primarily seen in art galleries. His contemporaries in this area include Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who still does art installations even as he has found broader fame for his feature films at the Cannes Film Festival, and Jakrawal Nilthamrong, who broke into features this year with Vanishing Point, now touring the festival circuit.

Chulayarnnon is still sticking with art galleries, though his inventive shorts have been a highlight of the recent editions of the Thai Short Film and Video Festival. He was chosen this year to produce the festival's annual new title sequence, a brief "bumper" that is shown before each program. He actually did two title sequences for this year's fest. One involves soldier statues "guarding" a military base, a blank movie screen in an empty auditorium and villagers praying to shrine. It includes an egg, one of the icons of the Thai Short fest. He also did a stop-motion animation, with insect-like birthday candles and a spiky egg.

He employs multiple experimental-film techniques in his multi-layered works, so the art gallery is really the best place to see Chulayarnnon at his freest range of expression.

Behind the Painting is the result of his participation in the artist-in-residence program last year at the Aomori Contemporary Art Center in Japan. It was previously exhibited there as part of the Aomori's Media/Art Kitchen program curated by Hiroyuki Hattori. In Bangkok, the exhibition is supported by the Japan Foundation, so be sure to complete the survey and reassure them that their efforts are most welcome.

Set in a colonial-style building on Silpakorn University's historic campus, right across the street from the Grand Palace in the old part of Bangkok, Behind the Painting gets progressively more interesting the deeper into it you go.

And it's actually pretty interesting right out of the gate, with the first room devoted to "Forget Me Not", a mixed-media work that comprises a 1:23-minute one-channel video loop of a key scene from Chulayarnnon's film, when Kirati hands Nopporn a "forget me not" flower. Text from a crucial hand-written note that says "forget me not" is rendered in neon and lights up the room, which came pre-installed with a checkerboard tile floor that seems like it has always been part of the exhibit.

The bulk of the short film is in the next room, a darkened gallery with 12 small lightbox/video screens suspended from the ceiling. On the back of each box is a watercolor painting of a still from a key scene, while the front of the box has the video. Each scene, about 2 to 4 minutes or so, runs on a loop.

You walk into the room looking at what I think is the back of the lightboxes – the side with the paintings. I found the best approach to appreciating the piece is to walk around the room clockwise as you enter, and watch each video starting with "The Letter from Siam", in which Nopporn is informed of the impending arrival of the Japanese man and his wife. The tale of Behind the Painting is further spelled out down the line, from "The First Trip" to the reflective epilogue, "Behind the Painting".

Others are "The Last Moment", "Nopporn's Letter", "Nopporn's Dream", "Kirati's Letter", "The Death of Chaokhun", "The Return of Nopporn", "Bad News", "Nopporn's Wedding" and "The Death of Kirati". The titles all read as if they are lifted from sequels to a goofy B-movie franchise. Which makes them great.

In addition to the suspended video screen/lightboxes are those janky little earphones that all galleries use for exhibitions like this. There are English subtitles, but if you listen in, you'll hear dialogue that's lifted from an actual Thai movie of Behind the Painting. It's the one from 2001 that was the last film of revered auteur Cherd Songsri – a director who had an inimitable knack for being faithful to the text of the old stories while still making his films relevant to modern audiences.

Chulayarnnon has employed a similar technique before. For one of his very early works, Golden Sand House, he used the audio from the 1980 Jarunee Saksawat classic Baan Sai Tong over his own version of the often-adapted tale of blue bloods feeling threatened by commoners, filming it in his own home with members of his family, including his very aged and infirm grandparents. Helpfully to me, Golden Sand House was part of a Filmvirus retrospective put on in Bangkok last year, during which Chulayarnnon offered a sneak preview of the partly finished Behind the Painting.

Another of Chulayarnnon's trademarks is that he often appears in his films, and he's an immediately relatable, friendly everyman character. In Behind the Painting, he plays both the Thai student Nopporn and, to hilariously entertaining effect, the refined noblewoman Kirati.

With the help of photo doubles and filmmaking magic that is convincing in various degrees, he puts Nopporn and Kirati in the same scene. He also uses that schoolboy trick of wrapping his arms around his shoulders so from the back it looks like he's making out with someone. Still, it's pretty slick.

About halfway through the lightbox display, I got over Chulayarnnon's drag act and despite his 5 o'clock shadow, I began see him as Kirati, not as a dude playing Kirati. And I suppose that's a commentary on the increasingly fluid nature of society's perceptions of gender and sexuality – notions that are being challenged right now in mainstream culture with TV shows like Transparent and Orange is the New Black winning Emmys, and the debate over same-sex marriage licenses in Kentucky.

As far as acting goes, Chulayarnnon is particularly good in the scene titled "Bad News", in which Nopporn, seeming very cheerful and pleased with himself, announces to Kirati that he's getting married. Kirati's face just drops right to the floor, even though in Chulayarnnon's mind her crestfallen expression was probably much more subtle.

Another fun scene is "Nopporn's Wedding", in which the tuxedo-clad Nopporn and his lovely Thai bride in her white wedding gown cavort in the landmark places where Thai brides and grooms tend to have their photos taken, like Sanam Luang, the public park that's a stone's throw from the art gallery and the Grand Palace. They also twirl about at the Democracy Monument, a symbolic spot I'm not so sure is very popular with couples or anybody these days.

Further concessions to contemporary comfort are found in the scenes from modern Tokyo, including Nopporn meeting Chaokhun and his bride outside the Japan Railways station.

After I did a round or two of the room with the lightboxes, I ventured deeper into the museum and was happily surprised to find there's more. Among the other works prepared for the exhibition is a table with an unfinished jigsaw puzzle on it. It's from "Nopporn's Dream". Titled "Incomplete Dream", it's 1,000 puzzle pieces, arranged just so the couple's faces are not yet filled in. If you visit, especially you obsessive-compulsive types, please don't feel compelled to complete the puzzle.

And finally, there's the piece "Mitake", in which you can actually go behind the painting of the painting from Behind the Painting. One one side of the 8-foot-wide lightbox is the titular watercolor work that the classically trained artist Kirati made of her and Nopporn sitting by a pool in a Technicolor forest. The other side has the video, containing scenes of Kirati's art education and her isolated, noble upbringing.

Helpfully, there's a little nook behind the painting, with stools arranged to sit on to view the video. It's also a good spot to take a break and soak it all in, which I needed after spending I guess close to an hour viewing the pieces. Meanwhile, a smattering of other visitors, including a small group, breezed in and out in what seemed like five minutes. Give it more time than that.

After seeing the incomplete version of Behind the Painting last year, I told Chulayarnnon that I did't feel the need to see any other version of that story. Of course at the time, I had no idea what he was planning, so now it's the art-gallery edition that must be seen and experienced, and for me it is the definitive version of Behind the Painting.

Chulayarnnon Siriphol's Behind the Painting opened on September 10 at the Art Center of Silpakorn University Wang Thapra. It is on show until October 13, 2015. Directions to the gallery are available online.

Festival festival! Young Man in Venice, Vanishing Point in Sao Paulo

[Note: Festival festival! is a reboot of a recurring feature on this blog, in which I will attempt to offer periodic updates about Thai films at festivals around the world. It was something I did quite often in the past, but not so much in recent years due to time constraints and other issues. Thai filmmakers, please feel free to let me know if you have an entry in an upcoming festival, and when I collect two or three items I will make a posting.]

Martin Scorsese's The Audition is out of the picture at the Venice International Film Festival, but there's still a cool short screening.

Wichanon Sumumjarn (Four Boys, White Whiskey and Grilled Mouse) will be in Venice's Orizzonti competition with The Young Man Who Came from the Chee River (Jer Gun Muer Rao Jer Gun), a 16-minute drama. Here's the description from the festival website:

Golf works as a debt collector in Khon Kaen. One day he wakes up early to go to work as usual. He meets many people, including a desperate man in debt who falls critically ill. The situation forces Golf to weigh his professional duty and his moral sense against each other.

Hear the roar of the motorbike in the trailer (embedded below) from Isan New Wave Production.



Meanwhile, a major Thai fixture on the festival circuit this year, Jakrawal Nilthamrong's debut feature Vanishing Point (วานิชชิ่ง พอยท์), has been making more appearances since winning the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. It has screened in Taipei, Hong Kong, Wroclaw, Poland and Moscow. Currently, Vanishing Point can be seen in São Paulo, Brazil, at the  Indie Festival.

São Paulo also has another Thai film that's been a hit at festivals this year, a little indie movie called Cemitério do Esplendor. I'll aim to have more on that soon.

Back to Vanishing Point, it got a positive review from The Hollywood Reporter in Taipei. Here's a snip:

Apart from the Richard C. Sarafian countercultural cult hit with which Jakrawal's film shares its name – a borrowing most probably down to the prominence of cars and crashes in the story here – Vanishing Point also contains a smattering of references from a few other classics from the "New Hollywood" era, ranging from the odd nods to the paranoia-drenched thrillers of Klute and The Conversation to the grand visual gestures of Michelangelo Antonioni's American forays of Zabriskie Point and The Passenger.

Another plus, Vanishing Point will actually come to Thai cinemas this year, with a release set for Bangkok's SF World Cinema on October 22, and other cities to follow. Keep track of those developments at the film's Facebook page.

Concrete Clouds float over London in Thai Indie Fest

U.K. independent movie distributor Day for Night is releasing Lee Chatametikool's award-winning drama Concrete Clouds (ภวังค์รัก, Phawang Rak) as part of the first Thai Indie Fest in London, which will screen several other award-winning indie Thai titles over the next month or so.

In fact, Thai Indie Fest got underway yesterday with a screening of Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's 36. Other entries are Tongpong Chantarangkul's road trip tale I Carried You Home, Aditya Assarat's post-tsunami romance Wonderful Town and Anocha Suwichakornpong's social drama Mundane History.

Up next on June 9 is I Carried You Home (Padang Besar, ปาดังเบซา), about two estranged sisters who are forced back together by the death of their mother, for a tense cross-country road trip with the corpse in the back of an ambulance. It screens at 8pm on June 9 at COG ARTSpace.

Wonderful Town, in which an architect planning a new development in an isolated town hit by the tsunami, strikes up a relationship with a hotel manager, screens at 7.15pm on Tuesday, June 23 at the Proud Archivist.

Concrete Clouds, which is set in Bangkok during 1997 financial crisis, brings together two estranged brothers after the suicide of their father. While the older brother (Ananda Everingham) tries to get things in order at home and attempts to reconnect with an old girlfriend, the aimless younger brother strikes up a relationship with a lonely neighbor girl.

It is the feature directorial debut for Lee, who is well known for his work as a film editor, particularly his collaborations with Apichatpong Weeraesthakul, most recently on Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น, Rak Ti Khon Kaen), which premiered at last month's Cannes Film Festival.

There are several events to mark the release of Concrete Clouds, with a screening at noon on June 27 at the Rich Mix with Lee doing a post-screening talk. He'll also be on hand for a show at 8.10pm on June 28 at the Ritzy and 7.30pm on July at the Regent Street Cinema. Concrete Clouds is also showing at the Watershed in Bristol from June 26 to July 2.

And Thai Indie Fest wraps up with Mundane History, a slow-burn social-class drama about the paralyzed son of a wealthy family being cared for by a male nurse from a rural upbringing. The screening is at 7pm on July 6 at the Regent Street Cinema.

"The Thai independent film scene is thriving, with a new generation of filmmakers coming to the fore. Often carrying undertones of social, political or economic uncertainty and realities in contemporary Thailand, common themes emerge – memory and imagination, love and loss, decay and regeneration," Day for Night says. "Thai Indie Fest will celebrate some of the freshest filmmaking from the Thai independent scene with a season of award‐winning debut features by Thai 'second new wave' directors."

All the films, winners of multiple awards in Thailand and abroad, share several other common threads, mainly Lee himself, an award-winning film editor who helped shape Mundane History and Wonderful Town. I'm pretty sure he was post-production supervisor on 36 and lash me with noodles if he wasn't involved somehow with I Carried You Home.

Also, there's actress Apinya Sakuljareonsuk, who stars in both Concrete Clouds and I Carried You Home. She just recently won a Tukkata Tong Award for best supporting actress for her work in Concrete Clouds.

Apichatpong-a-rama: Ovation for Cemetery of Splendour

Masterpiece.

That's the word being tossed around, and not lightly, to describe Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest feature, Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น, Rak Ti Khon Kaen), which had its world premiere on Monday at the Cannes Film Festival, and was warmly received with a 10-minute standing ovation.

Following the film's screening in the Un Certain Regard competition, pundits at Cannes are calling Cemetery of Splendour one of the best films in the fest, and some wonder why it wasn't included in the main Palme d'Or competition, especially since Apichatpong is a past Palme d'Or and Jury Prize winner. Adding to the feeling of irk is the fact that Splendour wasn't included in the fest's original line-up announcement – it wasn't added until about a week later.

A number-crunching critics rating ranks Splendour with a strong score of 8.45, making it second overall to Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's main competition title The Assassin, and ahead of Todd Haynes' much-buzzed-about Carol.

In an article in The Nation today, Apichatpong downplayed concerns about the Un Certain Regard slot. Here's the quote:

“Cemetery of Splendour is another step forward for me, but I understand why the film was chosen for Un Certain Regard. As I said on the stage, Un Certain Regard is the section for real discovery and excitement, and I am happy that the film is being shown with other titles from new directors who will be the future of cinema.”

Further coverage of the premiere was included earlier in the week in The Nation's Soopsip gossip column, where World Film Festival of Bangkok chief Kriengsak "Victor" Silakong was quoted:

"It is a truly Thai film and uses the Isaan dialect throughout," Victor observes. "It's an unbelievable mix of belief, the spiritual world and fact. Yet the film is simple and thought-provoking. Joe still has it, and I salute him!"

There were loud cheers as the credits rolled in Cannes. "The applause went on for a long time, like 10 minutes" Victor says. "It was fantastic!"

Anyway, to recap, Cemetery of Splendour is about a lonely middle-aged woman (Apichatpong's frequent actress Jejira Pongpas) who is caring for soldiers in a rural clinic who have been stricken with a mysterious sleeping sickness. She forms a bond with a patient named Itt (Banlop Lomnoi from Tropical Malady) while also forming a friendship with a spirit medium (Jarinpattra Rueangram), who says the slumbering malady was caused by a disturbance to "an ancient cemetery of kings".

A frequently used still image has Apichatpong's trademark fluorescent lights. Here, they are used in the treatment of the snoozing soldiers, and add a surreal science-fiction element to spiritual tale.

So let's get to those reviews. First up, Jessica Kiang from IndieWire's The Playlist:

"It is also because the mood 'Cemetery' evokes, a sense of alien wonder that seems not to sink in from the outside but to spring from the bass-deep pit of your own stomach, came to me as perhaps the purest expression of cinema as it was meant to be seen: in a theater, in the dark, in the quiet, inspiring and requiring a quality of distraction-free attention that is simply disappearing as a mode of interaction with art."

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian:

"This is another of his unique imagist cine-poems: an essay in psychogeography and a meditation on death, the presence of the spirit world in nature and the unquiet ghosts of guilt and pain in the Thai nation, as symbolised by the military - a recurrent trope in his work."

Justin Chang at Variety:

"While his tale of a hospital volunteer who bonds with an infected soldier emerges from the same mythic worlds explored in Tropical Malady (2004) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), the surreal visitations here occur at a more subdued, almost subterranean level; this is an eerily becalmed work in which spiritual possessions and mysterious deities come to seem virtually indistinguishable from ordinary reality.

Screen Daily's Allan Hunter:

Working through a largely linear narrative creates a more approachable piece than many of his previous films, suggesting the potential to broaden his core arthouse audience. “ Slow cinema” lovers and devoted followers of the director should also find enough to mull over in this mysterious, melancholic feature to feel that none of his distinctive vision has been compromised for the sake of accessibility.

And Jordan Mintzer in The Hollywood Reporter:

"Past lives and ancient ancestors are evoked through conversations that are both cryptic and oddly matter-of-fact, in a work that has the realistic vibe of a documentary but the unearthly qualities of a sustained reverie. This is nothing new for Weerasethakul, who in previous films has transformed men into tigers and ignored narrative conventions as much as possible, though there are moments here that seem more drawn out than before. A few surprises are nonetheless in store, especially when Itt wakes up and begins a sort-of mother-son relationship with Jen, even if his moments of consciousness are short lived."

The social media has more than its share of reviews. Here's one that recommends Cemetery of Splendour as a balm to those who overindulged:

Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong) was two blissful hours of cooling forest poetry. Rinsed my soul, cured my hangover. 👍 #Cannes2015

— Robbie Collin (@robbiereviews) May 18, 2015

There are also lots of interviews with the director. Among the most-cited I've come across is one he did with The Isaan Record, an online journalism effort that's headquartered in the film's location (and Apichatpong's native hometown), Khon Kaen. He reflects a lot on the northeastern Thailand city:

"I feel sorry to say that Khon Kaen is becoming very similar to other cities around the country that have no identity anymore. The best that city planners can come up with is placing dinosaurs around the city. We also feature that in the film. I think the film looks at the city with the eyes of sadness."

Other Q-and-A articles are at The Hollywood Reporter and Huffington Post.

IndieWire drew an unlikely connection between Cemetery of Splendour and Pixar's newest animated feature Inside Out.

And, there's good news for viewers in North America, who can relax in knowing that Cemetery of Splendour will get there thanks to Strand Releasing. Variety had that scoop. Strand had previously handled Apichatpong's 2010 Palme d'Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

As for a Thai release, The Nation article today by indie film producer and freelance film-festival correspondent Donsaron Kovitvanitcha ends with a bummer, saying "it seems unlikely that it will be seen in Thailand".

Of course that could be a bit of reverse psychology to make cinema-goers in Thailand suddenly want something they've been told they can't have.

Apichatpong-a-rama: Trailer and clips for Cemetery of Splendour

After a week of movie-going that has included the full-on adrenaline blasts of zombies in Phi Ha Ayodhaya and Mad Max: Thunder Road, I needed a cinematic chill-pill, and there's none better than those concocted by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Dreamy, otherworldly, fantastic, and serenely calm, Cemetery of Splendour bears all the calling cards of an Apichatpong film. It makes its debut today in the Un Certain Regard selection of the Cannes Film Festival. Here's the trailer. Just try not to be lulled by those dulcet classical guitar strums.





Starring the director's frequent collaborator and muse, Jenjira Pongpas (hurry and read more about her in an article by Kong Rithdee in the Bangkok Post) and Banlop Lomnoi (from 2004 Cannes Jury Prize winner Tropical Malady), it's about a lonely woman who cares for a soldier with sleeping sickness, at an old rural schoolhouse that's been converted into a sick ward.

There are also a pair of clips, courtesy of Unifrance, one of a family member fretting by the soldier's bedside, and another of Jenjira and her husband making offerings at a shrine. (Note: The clips now appear to be offline).


As the hour of the film's premiere approaches, Apichatpong's social-media machinery has shifted up another notch, with a Cemetery of SplendourTwitter account . Here's a sample:

Apichatpong W. @kickthemachine already in #Cannes2015 ready for the World Premiere of Cemetery of Splendour tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/98eCpAublL

— CemeteryOfSplendour (@cemetery_splend) May 17, 2015

Of course, the film is also on Facebook, which is where the image at the top comes from.

Apichatpong-a-rama: A splendiferous poster for Cemetery of Splendour

Feast your eyes upon the poster for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น, Rak Ti Khon Kaen), which is premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, in the Un Certain Regard competition.

It features Jenjira of the Jungle, that is Jenjira Pongpas, the director's longtime leading lady and collaborator, in what looks to be a tour-de-force for the unassumingly domineering actress.

Not only does the poster sum up everything that is Apichatpong about the film, Jenjira's jungle frock makes it appear as she is wearing camouflage. It fits with the story of Cemetery of Splendour, which is about a lonely middle-aged woman caring for a soldier with sleeping sickness.

Anyway, in the run-up to the Cannes premiere, Apichatpong has kicked his machinery into high gear, releasing the poster on Facebook and noting the premiere dates on Twitter:

--- Cemetery of Splendour --- World Premiere @ Cannes Film Festival, May 18th ,11 am & 5 pm @ the Debussy... http://t.co/nVc6SRtuOW

— Apichatpong W. (@kickthemachine) May 4, 2015

He'll be there in Cannes, along with three teams of producers and directors (including Wisit Sasanatieng) taking part in Thai Pitch 2015.

Cannes 2015: Wisit's Suriya back in the ring at Thai Pitch

Wisit Sasanatieng's long-in-development Suriya is among a trio of projects vying for backers at the second edition of the relaunched Thai Pitch, which takes place on the sidelines of the Cannes Film Festival.

Others taking part in Thai Pitch 2015 will be veteran helmer Sananjit Bangsapan with Uncle Ho and indie talent Wasunan Hutawet with Sydney.

Suriya is a biographical drama about an infamous Muay Thai fighter whose ingeniousness in the ring was contrasted by personal struggles outside. It could potentially be a Thai boxing version of Raging Bull, and would be Wisit's first feature since 2010's Red Eagle. It also marks a return to Cannes for the Thai New Wave veteran. Wisit's directorial debut, 2000's Tears of the Black Tiger, was the first Thai film to be officially selected for Cannes; it competed in the Un Certain Regard line-up. Athimes Arunroj-angkul (Phobia 2, Karaoke Girl) is producing Suriya, which has been pitched at other project markets over the years.

Sananjit, meanwhile, is seeking to make his return in the film industry. He previously did the gritty gunman tale Hit Man File in 2005 and the women-in-prison drama Butterfly in Grey in 2002. His Uncle Ho follows the exploits of a young Ho Chi Minh, who briefly lived in the northeastern city of Nakhon Phanom in the 1920s. While doing some organizing for the Communist Party in Thailand, the young Ho is targeted by a French assassin. Supong Javanasundara (Hit Man File) and Nakorn Veerapavati are producing.

And with Sydney, Wasunan, an alumnae of the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2012, seeks to make her feature directorial debut. It's the story of a young woman from the countryside who moves to Bangkok full of hope but soon falls into despair. Soros Sokhum (Wonderful Town, So Be It) and Parinee Buthrasri are the producers.

The Thai Pitch was relaunched in 2013 after a five-year absence from the Croisette.  It is coordinated by producer Raymond Phathanavirangoon (Headshot, Tokyo Sonata) and will be held at the Thai Pavilion.

The three film projects will bolster a growing Thai presence at this year's Cannes Film Festival, which is headlined by the return of the 2010 Palme d'Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul with his new feature Cemetery of Splendour. It is in the official selection for the Un Certain Regard program. It will be Apichatpong's fourth time in competition in Cannes, where he won the Un Certain Regard in 2002 with Blissfully Yours, the jury prize in 2004 with Tropical Malady and the Golden Palm in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

And actress-model "Chompoo" Araya A. Hargate returns for her third consecutive year as camera fodder for the red carpet. Among the many products she pitches, Chompoo is a spokesmodel for cosmetics brand L'Oreal, which has sponsored her trips and handled her designer wardrobe for appearances at Cannes since 2013.

More coverage of this year's Thai Pitch can be found at The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily and Film Business Asia.

Apichatpong-a-rama: Cemetery of Splendour set for Cannes Un Certain Regard

Image from Cemetery of Splendour, courtesy of Kick the Machine.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul will return to the Cannes Film Festival with his latest project, Cemetery of Splendour, which was among the official selections added in a special announcement by the fest.

According to Apichatpong's Kick the Machine website, Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น, Rak Ti Khon Kaen) is about a lonesome middle-aged housewife who tends to a soldier with a mysterious sleeping sickness. She falls into a hallucination that triggers strange dreams, phantoms and romance – all the usual ingredients of an Apichatpong joint. Featuring Apichatpong's longtime leading lady Jenjira Widner, it was filmed last year in the director's boyhood hometown of Khon Kaen, in the Northeast of Thailand.

Cemetery of Splendour is among a trio of Asian titles added yesterday to the Un Certain Regard program. The others are also Cannes returnees. Filipino director Brillante Mendoza will be there with Taklub. He was in the main competition in 2008 with Serbis and won the best director gong the following year with his gritty crime drama Kinatay. And Japan's Naomi Kawase has been given the opening slot in Un Certain Regard with her latest AN. A frequent Cannes attendee, she was in the main competition last year with Still the Water.

They join a roster that will be judged by a panel headed by Isabella Rossellini, whose mother Ingrid Bergman adorns the festival's poster this year. Previously announced Un Certain Regard selections include Neeraj Ghaywan's Fly Away Solo and Gurvinder Singh's The Fourth Direction from India, Shin Su-won's Madonna and Oh Seung-wook's Shameless from South Korea and Kiyoshi Kurasawa's Journey to the Shore from Japan.

For Apichatpong, this year will mark his return to Un Certain Regard, an enigmatic category that tends to be more adventurous and avant-garde than the main Palme d'Or race, which can also be pretty far out. He competed in Un Certain Regard on his first trip to Cannes in 2002 with Blissfully Yours, which won the top prize. It was the first Thai film to win an award at Cannes.

Apichatpong returned to Cannes in 2004, entering the main competition with Tropical Malady, which won the Jury Prize from the panel headed by Quentin Tarantino.

His big triumph at Cannes came in 2010, with the top-prize Palme d'Or win for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, awarded by the jury led by Tim Burton.

Apichatpong also served on the Palme d'Or jury in 2008, and his mid-length effort Mekong Hotel had a special screening at Cannes in 2012.

Such a track record had fans and pundits assuming Apichatpong's latest project would be among the official selection that was announced by festival chiefs last week. But it wasn't. Instead, the fest's programmers went with another Asian trio for the main competition – Hou Hsiao-Hsien's period martial-arts drama The Assassin (starring Shu Qi as a sword-for-hire who falls for her target), Mountains My Depart by China's Jia Zhang-ke and Japan's Hirokazu Koreeda with Umimachi Diary. Hard to argue against any of those choices. Anyway, Film Business Asia had more on that.

Cemetery of Splendour also Love in Khon Kaen or Rak Ti Khon Kaen has been backed by the Berlin Film Fest's World Cinema Fund and the Rotterdam fest's Hubert Bals Fund. It is produced by Simon Field and Keith Griffith of Illuminations Films, who had previously backed Uncle Boonmee and the related Primitive art project.

The 68th Cannes Film Festival runs from May 13 to 24.

Salaya Doc 2015 reviews: Asean documentary competition

The winning Best Asean Documentary, 03-Flats.

Mention Singapore's Housing and Development Board, and I guarantee my eyes are going to glaze over, but I gave the documentary 03-Flats a chance, and it surprised me with its compelling view of the public-housing apartment blocks, which beforehand I had mainly seen as cramped, drab spaces that the majority of Singaporeans call home.

Directed by Lee Yuan Bin of Singapore's indie-film 13 Little Pictures collective, 03-Flats examines the history of the HDB developments, which stand as a legacy of founding prime minister Lee Kwan Yew. Archival propaganda newsreel footage is mixed with intimate profiles of three single ladies who have transformed their apartments into homes. They are a grandmother (and her plants), a colorful middle-aged lady (and her cat) and a young artist who has transformed her apartment into an art studio. Aside from a look at the lives of the three women, there is also a sense of community in these towering edifices. My view of Singapore will be different if I visit again. Where I once just saw row upon row of blank buildings, I will now see neighborhoods.

Jurors were also impressed by 03-FLATS – they actually like it all caps, but I just kind of naturally resist that. Nonetheless, it was named Best Asean Documentary of the fifth Salaya International Documentary Film Festival, which wrapped up last Saturday at the Thai Film Archive.

A special mention winner, Lady of the Lake.

Special mention awards went to entries from Myanmar, Cambodia and Indonesia, edging out docs from the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

One of the special mentions, Yangon Film School student Zaw Naing Oo’s Lady of the Lake paid a lively visit to the spirit-worshipping "cult of the nat" in Pyun Su village, on the banks of Moe Yun Gyi Lake. A documentary short, it has tranquil scenes of fishing and everyday life on the lake interspersed with wild ceremonies in which worshippers appear to be in a trance, and chomp down on a wriggling raw fish.

Cambodia’s The Storm Makers was a warts-and-all examination of human trafficking as experienced by a young woman who was kept as a slave when she worked as a maid in Malaysia. A legacy and constant reminder of the ordeal is an infant son, born from when the woman was raped by another man while trying to escape her brutal employer. Her painful views are contrasted with the profile of a garrulous, opportunistic gentleman who runs a notorious recruiting agency in Phnom Penh. There's also a one-legged woman who hobbles from farmhouse to farmhouse, looking for more recruits. Directed by Guillaume Suon and produced by Rithy Panh, the film’s name comes from the effect the recruiters have on villages, bringing with them dark clouds of despair. It's yet another important entry from Cambodia, which has a keen indie film community keeping an eye on the quickly modernizing country and its population of poor workers who are all-too-easily exploited.

The Storm Makers won a special mention.

The Indonesian winner, Die Before Blossom, directed by Ariani Djalal, examined the increasing focus on Islam in public schools, and the effect it has on girls from two middle-class families. Technical problems during the screening I attended sapped my energy and distracted me from the important point of it all. Are they still teaching math and science in Indonesian schools, or is it all just religion? At one point, a teacher is telling the Muslim children about certain prayers they should recite for good luck on standardized tests, when one of the non-Muslim kids in the class pops up to say, "it's okay, we have our own prayers." The jury was impressed enough to give it a special mention.

“The film carries a feeling of desperation,” the jury statement said. “The silent voice and empty eyes of one of the two main characters are more than enough to display the deadly toxins of a society that cannot nurture the life of its own youth.”

I liked the succinctness of the Thai entry, Echoes from the Hill, by film students Jirudtikal Prasonchoom and Pasit Tanadechanurat, which provided a glimpse into the culture of the “Pgaz K’Nyau” or “simple humans” in a Karen village in the mountains of the North. They believe in tree spirits, and have developed a sustainable way of life that they say is in harmony with nature. But their culture is under threat by Thai government plans to build the Mae Khan Dam and a national park. Beautiful nature scenes are padded with a bit of public-hearing footage, in which the film's main subject, this cool village elder, is present and testifies, so it's all on record about the harm that will come.

A late-to-confirm entry from the Philippines, Nick and Chai, was simply heartbreaking. Directed by Rowena Sanchez and Charena Escala, it visited an achingly young couple who lost all four of their children to 2013’s Typhoon Yolanda. While haunted by the deaths of the children, Nick and Chai put their energy and college-trained agricultural skills into grassroots organizing that helps their community rebuild.

Die Before Blossom, a special mention winner.

Salaya Doc 5's competition was rounded out by Madam Phung’s Last Journey by Nguyen Thi Tham, which is a ride around Vietnam with a travelling carnival troupe run by ageing drag queens. I've covered it before at the Luang Prabang fest. I thought it was pretty great.

Apart from the competition, Salaya Doc had the opening film The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer's follow-up to 2012's The Act of Killing. Here, Oppenheimer and his "anonymous" crew continue their examination of the mass killing of leftists, activists and other opponents of military rule in Indonesia in the 1960s. While The Act of Killing rubbed me the wrong way with its focus on the perpetrators of the genocide, allowing them to re-enact the killings in often grandiose and self-aggrandizing fashion, The Look of Silence had me nodding in agreement with its focus strictly on the victims as seen through the eyes of an Indonesian optician, who travels from town to town, confronting the people responsible for his brother’s death. At each visit, a pattern emerges, with the interviewees at first denying having any knowledge of the killings, but the guy keeps gently questioning, trying different lenses as it were, and then there's that look that comes across their face as if to say "Okay, you got me," and they realize they can no longer lie.

The Look of Silence was thematically bolstered during the run of the festival by the films of Indo-Dutch auteur Leonard Retel Helmrich, who was the director in focus and conducted masterclasses in his smooth, flowing, up-close-and-personal "Single Shot Cinema" technique. Indeed, Oppenheimer has acknowledged Helmrich as a big influence. And it's apparent, not only stylistically, but hugely from the Indonesian angle. Among the films shown was Helmrich's series of documentaries covering 12 years of the lives of a widowed grandmother and her family during times of political upheaval in the Suharto regime. I saw Promised Paradise, in which a street-performing puppeteer friend of Helmrich's goes searching for answers about how such terrorist acts as 9/11 and the series of bombings in Bali and Jakarta are justified by Islam. It gave me another view of Islam to ponder along with Die Before Blossom.

A big favorite of the fest was Flowers of Taipei: Taiwan New Cinema, in which various filmmakers and artists talk about the profound influence of directors Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien and the Taiwan New Cinema movement of the 1980s. Chinlin Hsieh, a programmer at the International Film Festival Rotterdam who also served as a juror on Salaya Doc 5, used her influence to gain access to various figures, from dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei to film critic Tony Rayns.

Also interviewed was Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, at his jungle home in Chiang Mai. He admitted being lulled to sleep by the languid pace of some of the films, and he hoped his films have the same magical effect. "It's like being transported," I think he said, like Scotty from the Enterprise.

A favorite segment of mine was Chinlin's interview with Tsai Ming-liang, which captures the Taiwanese-Malaysian auteur in his Sphinx-like majesty. With the camera set firmly, just as it would be in one of his movies, Tsai just sits there quietly and really, does not need to say a thing. I chatted Chinlin up afterward, and she said she filmed Tsai for an hour but could not get him to admit he was influenced by the New Cinema movement, so that three-minute scene was what she came up with, and it's perfect.

Later, I saw 03-Flats and I thought I recognized the influence of Taiwanese cinema, which I think is especially apparent in the typically slow-paced Singaporean and Malaysian indie films. But maybe that was just my imagination running wild.

More coverage:

• At home in our Asean [The Nation]