Lifescapes 2012 reviews: Golden Slumbers, Art of Freedom shorts

Cambodia's Golden Age of cinema lasted just 15 years, starting in 1960, and was at its height in 1975 when the country's amazing pop-culture scene was abruptly and violently shuttered under the deadly Khmer Rouge. Cinemas were closed and actors and filmmakers were considered "enemies of the people". Some of those who survived fled to places like France, which is where young director Davy Chou, making his debut feature with the documentary Golden Slumbers (Le Sommeil D’Or), comes from.

Chou,  the grandson of Van Chann, a prominent Cambodian producer in the 1960s and 1970s, deftly mixes talking-head interviews with old movie clips, photos and images of the old cinemas and studios as they appear today. Interviewees include screen siren Dy Saveth, who's still in Phnom Penh giving acting lessons and talking about the old days to anyone who'll listen. Others are the avuncular Ly Bun Yim as well as Huy Vathana and Ly You Sreang.

Movie titles like Screaming Gibbon, Snake Lady and Snake Man are mentioned in a conversation between cinephiles that takes place in a car as it bumps along a Cambodian dirt road and into the capital.

Former studio owner Yvon Hem reveals his past life to his children – a second family started after his first died during the KR era – and the youngsters wonder why dad never told them he was a producer. But it's too painful to remember, he tells them, as he surveys the location of his old studio, now apparently being turned into an outdoor beer bar.

It's these visits to the old haunts of Cambodia's cinematic heyday that are most poignant in Golden Slumbers. A love ballad from one of the old movies plays while the camera pans around the room of a karaoke parlor, while men clink glasses with young women. The joint used to be one of Phnom Penh's movie palaces. And remember, the rock music of the era by singers like Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea. Those jangling surf-rock sounds were also part of the movies. Another former cinema is a tenement, home to more than 100 squatter families living among the ruins. Pink bougainvilla petals blow across the pavement as another filmmaker talks about the lost era. Another interview is offset by the spark from a construction laborer's arc-welding torch.

Most of the films from Cambodia's Golden Age are lost, though there are various clips and ephemera to be found. Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, Cambodian filmmakers have struggled to restart a once-vital industry in the face of cheaply produced karaoke videos and TV variety shows. It's filmmakers like Davy Chou and Chhay Bora, whose Khmer Rouge family drama Lost Loves also played in the Lifescapes Southeast Asian Film Festival and has opened in Phnom Penh cinemas, who, by reassessing and seeking to reconcile their country's past, stand as symbols of hope for Cambodia's cinematic future.

In addition to the Lifescapes festival, where it played twice, Golden Slumbers was also shown this past weekend at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

The Lifescapes Southeast Asian Film Festival presented a selection from the historic Art of Freedom Film Festival held in late December-early January in Rangoon. Organized by none other than newly freed democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi along with outspoken comedian, filmmaker and formerly jailed political activist Zarganar, it was the first "free" film festival held in Burma, which is undergoing democratic reforms after decades of brutal military dictatorship.

Three shorts, all with the filmmakers there for a Q&A, were presented.

Min Htin KoKo Gyi, a co-organizer of the Art of Freedom festival, directed Uninterruptedness, in which the Burmese script of one of his poems about death and the circle of life is mixed with images.

Click in Fear by Sai Kyaw Khaing, which won the best documentary award at the Art of Freedom fest is about a photographer who has to leave Burma after his photos of the 2007 uprising by monks in the "Saffron Revolution" were used in the international press. The short has been presented before in the 2009 World Film Festival of Bangkok, but I think this was a slightly longer and re-edited version.

The highlight of the program was Rope, a 6-minute drama that won the Best Short Film Award at the Art of Freedom fest. Director Min Thaike said he wanted to present the daily lives of residents in Rangoon hi-rises, who've developed a system of ropes that they use to pull things up to their apartments. The ropes are used for items delivered daily, like newspapers. The main character in Rope has his breakfast delivered – a bag of milky tea and fried bread snacks. But pulling the vittles up to his ledge proves difficult when it gets snagged along the way, and there are hungry kittens in pursuit.

BEFF6: An Escalator in World Order

Held every other year or so, or just whenever the eclectic group of film scholars, art curators, critics and filmmakers get around to it, the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival's theme for its sixth edition is "Raiding the Archives", and its focus is on finding new contexts for archival material, especially home movies and old footage.

Last Saturday's opening program, An Escalator in World Order, perfectly encapsulated that aim. Directed by Kim Kyung-man, the South Korean documentary was a remix of South Korean propaganda films and newsreel footage in which leaders pour on the vitriol that's just as staggeringly potent as anything cooked up by their Northern counterparts or by the Soviet Union at its height.

There's marching bands, processions of missile launchers and visits by U.S. presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Religious leaders take the pulpit to invoke the United States as South Korea's higher power, and only the might of the U.S. military can possibly protect the nation from the hell that is north of the 38th Parallel.

It's a perverted, twisted message – a wicked blend of Korean traditional culture and old-timey "America, fuck yeah" patriotism that could have only been created by the Statue of Liberty eating kimchi and then puking. It would have played nicely alongside Team America: World Police and Robert Altman's MASH.

Escalator, an audience-award winner at last year's Jeonju International Film Festival, was preceded by Ghosts in the Classroom by Ukrit Sa-nguanhai, which is a weirdly looping 2-minute short showing a bizarre discipline practice in a Thai schoolroom.

"History of Thai Experimenta 1" sampled Thai experimental films from several eras, going as far back as 1985 with Dome Sukwong's Nang Sod to last year's Cutter, Trimmer and Chainsaw by Pathompon Tesprateep. The program aimed to be "a historical ... arrangement of collected materials, where special memories dwell, magically brought alive." The highlight was an early effort by Panu Aree, 2000's Once Upon a Time, in which he used home-movie footage filmed by his father of the family's visit long-gone Dan Niramit amusement park and combined it with voice-over interviews of people remembering the place. It was mixed in with a bunch of highly experimental works like Boring Blinker by Surabongse Binichkhah (1985), that were flashing lights, blurry images and rushing sound that all seemed to coalesce into one mind-numbing work for a stylistic overload that wouldn't have been out of place in a Tony Scott action movie.

Nguyen Trinh Thi was present with some of her Hanoi DOCLAB team to present three short- and medium-length documentaries. A Soldier's Song Sample Experiment took an old Vietnamese social realism war movie and laid over new audio. Chronicle of a Tape Recorded Over is a road movie inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon, in which Thi travelled the Ho Chi Minh Trail asking people to tell stories. At one point she and her camera crew are detained by officials, but the camera keeps rolling, capturing the bureaucrat as Thi tries to pin him down on the differences between tourists shooting video and what she's doing. The third entry in the program was Hard Rails Across a Gentle River, a four-segment package of short documentaries of life around a railroad bridge and riverbank neighborhood. They'll also be showing a selection of other films at the Lifescapes festival this week in Chiang Mai.

Sunday's program opened with "Now You See It", "adventures in perception and a timely return to the politics of looking". The varied program made things interesting. Blur Luminous by Taweewit Kijtanasoonthorn looked at the world through an oddly refracted lens so that everyday scenes became geometric patterns. UK director Jessica Mautner's Phi used footage of the Greek riots with "puff, puff, puff" sound effects coming from her lips. Re-banho (Wash Herd) by Tales Frey had a half dozen men and women performing an odd washing ritual, fully clothed in front of a church. 724 14th St by Taiwan's Ching Yi Tseng was Super 8 footage shot a few years ago in San Francisco and is a memory of the streetcars and other sights from that address. The Big Picture by Suporn Shoosongdej has Siamese fighting fish and other images from "a broken record called Thainess [that] goes round and round and round and round." Coms Device by Nadav Assor has an actress performing an Israeli soldier's monologue about using a backpack radio transmitter as a "scanning device" to relieve boredom by messing with Palestinians passing through a checkpoint. The image is the actress reflected in the cameraperson's eye. And Pulsation by Pieter Geenen captures the last 14 minutes and 30 seconds of a night from the Greek side of Cyprus, looking to an opposite mountain, where a giant lighted Turkish Cypriot flag flashes on and off throughout the night. And that must be galling to folks trying to sleep on the Greek side.

"Women on the Move, Men at Home" was a program of home movies with talks by experts, beginning with clips by amateur female filmmakers in New Zealand of the 1920s and '30s, curated by the late Kathy Dudding of the New Zealand Film Archive and presented Mark Williams. The "Men at Home" portion was home movies from Taiwan and Singapore in the 1960s. Presented by George Clark, Zhuang Ling's works captured his wife's pregnancy and the newborn baby. Richard MacDonald was tasked with finding home movies in Singapore and Malaysia. From the National Archives of Singapore came films by Charles Ong of his son's 6th, 8th and 10th birthday parties. But sadly in Malaysia, no one seemed to understand the concept of home movies, or least the concept of archiving them.

The Singaporean birthday parties were complemented nicely in the next program, "Was Here, Was Now" in The Impossibility of Knowing by Tan Pin Pin, who captures old spaces in rapidly changing Singapore. The program, which sought to capture "cinematic acts of remembrance in the land of the victors’ amnesia", began with Untitled #1 from the series Eight Men Lived in the Room by Hyewon Kwon in which 45-seconds of newsreel footage of a Korean factory workers dorm is replayed several times, each time with different narration, telling the story of the building from its triumphant opening, to an accidental death, a fugitive hiding there and its eventual decay and demolition. It's surprising how effective and entertaining it was, even though the same footage is repeated a half-dozen times or so. Sutadi Ain’t Here Anymore by Marthen Luther Sesa chronicles the filmmaker's fruitless search for a bicycle taxi driver named Sutadi. And who knows, maybe Sutadi never existed. OZ@1950 by Dirk De Bruyn harks back to the "white Australia" era with hilariously remixed and zoomed newsreel footage of a speech about what defines the "new Australian". A Brief History of Memory by Chulayarnnon Siriphol recalls the April 2009 "Black Songkran" in which red-shirt political protests turned violent, and one woman lost her son. It was an award-winner at last year's Thai Short Film and Video Festival. And Lay Claim to an Island by Chris Kennedy remembers the 1969 American Indian occupation of San Francisco's Alcatraz.

Last Sunday's closing program was a pair of works from LUX, the London-based artists' cinema agency. New It New John by Duncan Campbell is a look back at John Z. DeLorean and the founding of his company in Northern Island to make his iconic stainless-steel sports cars. News footage chronicles the story of of DeLorean's Pontiac GTO musclecar, the oil embargo that ended that gas-guzzling era and then the promise of the 1980s, only to be followed by financial troubles. It ends with befuddled and contentious union auto workers who've occupied the shuttered DeLorean factory being interviewed, and one by one they trickle away from the camera. Sack Barrow by Ben Rivers is footage from some old factory. Not even sure what they do there, but it involves strange liquids, all in an dilapidated and decaying facility.

BEFF6 continues this week, with programs at the Goethe-Institut and the Jim Thompson Art Center's William Warren Library. This Saturday, the festival is back at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, starting at noon with "History of Thai Experimenta 2" – home movies collected at the Thai Film Archive. Another program on Saturday, "Poetics of Longing", features shorts by the likes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (his debut student short 0016643225059) and Wichanon Sumumjarn (Four Boys, White Whiskey and Grilled Mouse). A highlight on Saturday is the Thai premiere of World Without End, a 1953 documentary, partly shot here by experimental filmmaker Basil Wright. That's at 6.15. The closing day on Sunday starts at noon, and among the highlights are "From Experimenta India", "Hong Kong Bohemia" and "KLEX @ BEFF6", featuring selections from the Kuala Lumpur Experiental Film and Video Festival. Click the link for the full schedule.

Top Secret gets deluxe treatment on DVD

I don't ordinarily get too excited by the release of Thai films on DVD in Thailand. After all, most don't have English subtitles and therefore hold little interest for most folks outside of Thailand. They might as well not exist.

But the recent release of GTH's teenage billionaire comedy Top Secret Wairoon Pun Lan caught my eye as I was passing a Mangpong outlet the other day.

The deluxe box set features special artwork by none other than Somboonsuk Niyomsiri, a man better known as Piak Poster, who made his name back in the 1960s as a movie-poster artist. Back then, artists would painstakingly encapsulate all the movie's highlights into the sweeping canvas of the posters and billboards. It's a trade little practised these days, though there are still some around. Piak later turned to directing, making a string of popular teen-oriented films in the 1970s. Now in his 80s, he made his acting debut in Top Secret, portraying the kindly "uncle" of the teenage entrepreneur who created a popular seaweed snack brand. Anyway, I like how out of all the big floating heads in the design, Piak's is the biggest.

And as if that illustration weren't enough, inside the box is a Monopoly-like board game with young star Patchara Chirathivat's face on the money. There's also a calendar with more artwork.

GTH has always done elaborate box sets for its DVDs, but this one is probably one of their best. It's in shops for around 600 baht. But of course, there's no English subtitles.

9th WFFBKK review: Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours

• Directed by Rirkrit Tiravanija
• Starring Lung Neaw
• Thai premiere at the 9th World Film Festival of Bangkok, January 26, 2012; no rating
• Wise Kwai's rating: 2/5

Following the trend of visual artists breaking into making feature films that has been largely spearheaded by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a contemporary of his, Rirkrit Tiravanija, offers a counterpoint of sorts to the magical realism of Apichatpong's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

Rirkrit has his own "uncle", an elderly Chiang Mai laborer and farmer named Neaw. But Rirkrit's debut feature, Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours, has few magical moments. Basically, it's 2.5 hours of Rirkrit and his Mexican producer Cristian Manzutto following Neaw around with their cameras, not blinking as the old man goes about his day sleeping, bathing in the river, getting dressed, eating, drinking, smoking and praying. His sufficiency lifestyle involves wandering around the hills and forests of rural Thailand, foraging for food, subsistence farming and chatting with friends.

Rirkrit, a Hugo Boss Prize recipient and honoree of the Thai Culture Ministry's Silpathorn Award for visual art, is known worldwide for his "relational aesthetics". His exhibitions have seen him serving up spicy curry dishes for his guests. He's used Neaw before in art projects, among them an eight-hour video loop.

And like that eight-hour video, which had Neaw picking his nose, combing his hair, dozing and eating, the feature documentary Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours would perhaps best work as the accompaniment to a larger art exhibition. Because as a movie that you have to sit down and stay awake for in a cinema, Lung Neaw is a challenge. And after watching it, I felt as if I'd just been the victim of a hoax by Rirkrit, which is perhaps his intent, to hoodwink film-festival viewers in Venice and Bangkok into becoming part of his art project.

"It is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people," Rirkrit is quoted as having said one time about his work.

And what you would have seen following the screening of Lung Naew was people walking out of a theater, shaking their heads, wondering what the point was.

And maybe that's the point.

The film is broken up by intertitles with slogans like "no fire, no ash" and "tomorrow is another day" in big block letters. I could easily see the slogans silkscreened in huge black letters on a white T-shirts and sold for high prices in clothing boutiques, maybe for charity.

Only occasionally does Lung Neaw offer what might be called excitement in contrast to the paint-drying, like when Neaw grooves to a song by Thai alternative rock band Moderndog on a tinny little radio while laying in his rice-field shelter. (He was actually listening to a Thongchai "Bird" McIntyre song, but Rirkrit preferred to involve his hip pals in Moderndog than pay for the rights to use the Bird song.)

It's only towards the end, when Neaw is finally resigned to the camera and starts engaging it, do things pick up, with Neaw talking a bit more and revealing a little about himself and his 60-plus years of hard living. He then goes for a pop of rice whiskey and reels and staggers off down the road.

Related posts:

• You've met Uncle Boonmee, now meet Uncle Naew

Hua Hin fest gets Gosling, awards It Gets Better

‎From left, Dr. Sorajak, Secretary General of the National Federation of Film Associations of Thailand, Nicolas Winding Refn, Liv Guldenlove, Ryan Gosling, Festival chairman Suwat Liptapanlop and Festival director Jareuk Kaljareuk at the Hua Hin International Film Festival's gala red-carpet event. (Via Facebook)

The first edition of the Hua Hin International Film Festival wrapped up its four-day run over the weekend, with organizers giddy over the participation of the big-name star Ryan Gosling.

Actress Michelle Yeoh and French director Luc Besson appeared at the closing gala on Sunday for the Southeast Asian premiere of the Aung San Suu Kyi biopic The Lady, which was filmed in Thailand.

The festival also gave out its first Audience Award, and it went to a Thai film, It Gets Better (ไม่ได้ขอให้มารั, Mai Dai Kor Hai Ma Rak), indie director Tanwarin Sukhapisit's follow-up to the critically acclaimed but banned drama Insects in the Backyard. With intertwining storylines about transsexuals in love (among them veteran actress Penpak Sirikul playing an ageing transsexual), It Gets Better has similar themes as Insects but is apparently geared for more-mainstream approval, as evidenced by the Audience Award. It'll be released in Thai cinemas on February 14, Valentine's Day.

Film Business Asia has a final wrapup of its HHIFF coverage.

The festival had hoped to attract big-name stars for its red-carpet event. Jude Law had been mentioned as a possibility, but those rumors turned out to be false. Then when Drive star Ryan Gosling arrived in Thailand to start work on director Nicolas Winding Refn's latest effort Only God Forgives, the rumor mills cranked up again, and organizers were rewarded with an appearance by Gosling and Refn, and they took time to schmooze with the officials from the festival and National Federation of Film Associations of Thailand, among them Suwat Liptapanlop, the businessman and political figure who dreamed up the whole idea of the Hua Hin fest after he attended the Cannes Film Festival.

Coconuts Bangkok has more on the Gos getting mobbed and what he's doing here in Thailand.

In addition to Gosling, other Hollywood talent included Alex Meraz from The Twilight Saga, who took time out for an elephant ride.

Vietnamese star Johnny Nguyen, who lit up the red  carpet at 2007's Bangkok International Film Festival, was back in Thailand to grace the Hua Hin fest and train at a local Muay Thai camp.

There's more photos and stuff at the festival's Facebook page.

It's April in Rotterdam

The International Film Festival Rotterdam is underway, and as in the past recent years, there is a Thai film in competition and several others in the other programs.

Up for the Tiger Awards is In April the Following Year, There Was a Fire (สิ้นเมษาฝนตกมาปรอยปรอย) by Wichanon Somumjarn. Previously titled Like Raining at the End of April, it's the debut feature from the director of the award-winning short Four Boys, White Whiskey and Grilled Mouse.

The story of a young man returning to his hometown in northeastern Thailand from his job in Bangkok to attend a friends’ wedding takes place during the hottest month of the year, "turns into a semi-autobiography, and a journey into the labyrinth of the real and the imagined, the past and the present, the personal and the political."

The buzz about April is already quite positive, with IndieWire noting it as "advancing" in its first dispatch from Rotterdam:

"Very playful from the start: what looks like the lead character stops by an indie film set and asks his buddy what film they're shooting; friend replies In April the Following Year, There Was a Fire, the name of this film. Later at a bus depot at first it sounds like ambient muzak playing in the back, but reveals itself to be a non-digetic score for the credit sequence, and very lush at that. These are the kinds of slippages on which Apichatpong Weerasethakul made his bones; so for this is lively enough not to be dismissed as a carbon copy."

In a video introduction for his film, Wichanon says "you shouldn't miss this film because it has horses. Horses are beautiful." There's also a trailer (embedded below) and a Facebook page.

Another Thai feature in Rotterdam is I Carried You Home, which opened the recent 9th World Film Festival of Bangkok. The debut feature by Tongpong Chantararankul makes its European premiere in the IFFR's Bright Future line-up for new directors.

There are 196 short films in the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, a jaw-dropping number that the IFFR says is "not as extensive as past years".

Among the selection of Spectrum Shorts is Schip by Tanatchai Bandasak, which has a ship floating down the Mekong, and 15th Thai Short Film and Video Festival: Opener, a two-minute clip by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit that was the introduction to screenings at last year's Thai Short Film and Video Festival. Heralding the preponderance of Canon digital photo cameras in filmmaking, it has granny showing off her 7D and explaining its features.

As part of the Rotterdam fest, there's CineMart, where filmmakers gather to make their pitches for financing. Past Tiger Award winner Aditya Assarat (Wonderful Town) is there trying to raise cash for something called White Buffalo and Apichatpong is wearing his producer's hat for a project by French filmmaker Christelle Lheureux, Le Vent des ombres.

The influence of Apichatpong looms large over the independent film scene in Thailand, and his win at Cannes for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives has opened more doors for Thai filmmakers. Just about every indie feature and short being made today seems to have been inspired by Apichatpong. His influence is felt outside Thailand too, and Variety in particular notes the trend of visual artists turning to film. Here's an excerpt:

Leif Magne Tangen, of art-oriented production company Vitakuben, sees a new appetite in the market.

"Everything changed with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai filmmaker and artist who won Cannes in 2010. You can see that more independent producers are looking towards projects that cross this bridge between contemporary art and filmmaking."

Ong-Bak: The Video Game announced

Gamers will have moves like Tony Jaa in Ong-Bak: The Video Game that's being developed by Studio HIVE of Thailand, under an agreeement with Sahamongkol Film International, according to various gaming websites.

Akarapol Techaratanaprasert, business development director at Sahamongkol Film International says:

"Ong-Bak is well known as a powerful international martial arts brand. We are very selective with our licensing partners and found in Studio HIVE the right partner to bring Ong-Bak to gaming platforms. Their approach to tie in movie and game is the right way to create a perfect interactive entertainment."

Kan Supabanpot, general manager at Studio HIVE adds:

"It’s a great honor for our team to work on the very first Ong-Bak multiplatform game. As a Thai development studio we love the movie and have a deep understanding of the Ong-Bak brand values and we make sure that the videogame will be an inspiring martial arts action experience for gamers."

At this time, it's unknown what platforms the game is being developed for, but it seems like it'll be available for X-Box 360 and PlayStation 3.

9th WFFBKK reviews: Short Wave, Mango Filmmakers, Unreasonable Man

Thai shorts were seeded throughout the World Film Festival of Bangkok's Short Wave selections and the special Mango Filmmakers program. There was also the feature, An Unreasonable Man, which is actually a trilogy of shorts.

Short Wave 1 – Distinction by Tulapop Saenjaroen was the lone Thai short in this international package. It won a special mention and the Vichitmatra Award at last year's Thai Short Film & Video Festival. It's an interesting social experiment, interviewing a maid and the lady of the house and having them switch roles, with the maid putting on her boss lady's blouse, hairdo, make-up and earrings, and the lady throwing on the maid's ratty T-shirt and tying back her hair. After awhile, the identities blur so it's somewhat hard to tell who is who.

Short Wave 2 – Kong Pahurak brings his usual sense of dark humor to An Indiscreet Incident on Yotha Street, about a young man living in a rooftop apartment who is visited by a crow spirit. A symbiotic relationship turns tormented when they run out of canned fish. Clothes Pegs is from Japan with Japanese actors and a very Japanese fatalistic sensibility, but the director is Thai. Like Kong, he studies at Waseda University. It's a strongly acted story of a depressed housewife and an eventful day for her after her husband leaves for a business trip. A third Thai entry was Kanin Ramasoot's The Last Shot, which was previously in competition at the 2010 Thai Short Film & Video Festival. Cliched but entertaining, it's a crime drama about an ageing, clumsy police sergeant (Vinai Taewattana) who tries to solve a murder-suicide on his last day before retirement. He gets help from a wheelchair-bound nerd (Torphong Kul-on from I Carried You Home).

Short Wave 3 –  Passing Through the Night by Wattanapume Laisuwanchai competed in last year's Venice Film Festival. It's an experimental piece that's dominated by its sound design, ambient breath-like noise that support the scenes of an apartment building hallway, a vacant, ruined room and scary macro close-ups of an elderly person's skin and body parts. And you do get the sense of "passing". It provided a great lead-in to an excellent black-and-white short by Christelle Lheureux, La Maladie Blanche, which is set during a festival in a rural French mountain village. A wild pig emerges from the woods, turning the short into a fairy tale that recalls Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke and there's a journey into a cave like Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Short Wave 5 –  This is an all-Thai package of student films from Mahidol University. Some were weird, ambiguous thrillers, like Photoshop, which stars Penpak Sirikul as a mysterious woman who demands that a harried farang photo studio owner let her sit for a portrait. Another was Coax by Kevin Vivis-Visithsiri, about a young guy finding himself trapped in a room and hearing a voice on the other side of the wall. Never Say Goodbye by Sutthasin Tanmanasiri has a guilt-wracked single mother caring for her comatose daughter. Another strange one was Youth by Sutthinan Ampornchatchawan, in which a girl wakes up and finds her soul has been transferred to the body of a young woman, and there's an older man about. A cute one was Amaranth by Lakkana Palawatvichai, about a grandmother who's lost her dentures. Also cute was the animation Illumination by Panpilas Pitayanon, about a lonely light bulb that wants to pay tribute to His Majesty the King. Thawan Duchanee by Siripa Intavichein was a rather dry documentary on the well-known Thai artist.

Mango Filmmakers Project – Anocha Suwichakornpong's Electric Eel Films collaborated with the Nation Group's Mango TV, working with three teams of young filmmakers, each making their own project. The results were enjoyably quirky and put the spotlight on promising new talents. Thanks to the help from the Eels, the filmmakers had technical assistance from experienced indie filmmakers and even drew on the talents of experienced actors, such as Wonderful Town's Anchalee Saisoontorn, Hi-So's Sajee Apiwong and Insects in the Backyard director Tanwarin Sukkhapisit in a cameo role. Reminisce by Thai Pradithkesorn started out weird, with an elderly woman entering a tattoo shop. What's her business there? It then goes to another point in time, though that's not immediately clear. A daughter and her mother are chatting about boys, and then another daughter and another mother, and they have nearly the same conversation. Eventually the story of that tat is explained. Gun Kama by Nuttawat Attasawa is a black comedy in which a young man performing a "planking" stunt falls from the ledge of his apartment and into the lives of a young woman who's the mistress of a gangster. She's having an affair with another man in the building. The gangster returns to the apartment earlier than expected and all hell breaks loose. The best of the bunch was the Isaan comedy One Man Can Run by Nuntawut Poophasuk. It's about a young man who's given too much change by an ice-cream man, and to correct the mistake he spends the next 25 minutes or so going through increasingly hilarious and ridiculous motions as he tries to chase down the tricycle-riding vendor. There's even special effects, with the runner calling his nerd friend to hack the satellite grid to pinpoint the ice-cream man. An honest man to a fault, the running man is waylaid in his quest by various other people in distress, and he stops to help them. It'd be neat to see One Man Can Run expanded into a feature, as long as the energy could be sustained and the same exhuberant cast could be used.

The Unreasonable Man – The first part of this trilogy of shorts was made in 2009. Supharat Boonamayam directs, with well-known actor Somchai Klemglad (who also co-directed) as a brooding Luddite barber who is given a cellphone and is mystified about how to use it. The story is inspired by a wrong-number call received by the director, and I think most phone users in Thailand can relate – I've probably said more words on my phone to wrong-number callers than I have to colleagues and friends. The barber receives a call and dials back the mystery number and gets a woman's voice recording. He's then obsessed with the woman and listens to the recorded greeting repeatedly. It's never quite clear if his daydreams about her come true or if they just stay dreams. In later episodes, the barber takes an art class and serves as the artist's assistant. And a mysterious man (Pramote Sangsorn) starts hanging around, causing more confusion for the brooding barber. The barber also fantasizes about a woman who works in a coffee shop. The barbershop boss and a co-worker who is always licking an ice-cream treat provide welcome comic relief to Somchai's brooding and Pramote's looming mysteriousness.

Ready? And ... here's the poster and trailer for The Cheer Ambassadors

Among the homegrown entries in the World Film Festival of Bangkok, I'd think you'd be hard-pressed to find a more enthusiastic bunch than the people behind The Cheer Ambassadors.

The documentary about the Thai National Cheerleading Team is the story of one young Thai man who saw the so-called "Cheerleading Olympics", the World Cheerleading Championships on ESPN and then had a dream of a Thai team carrying their flag to compete. So he rallied his friends and they formed a team, building it from scratch as they watched YouTube performances of American cheerleaders and struggled to safely learn the sport in late-night practices on hard concrete floors without benefit of mats.

Directed by Luke Cassady-Dorion and Jason W. Best, the documentary focuses on five key team members, the coaches and the team fortuneteller.

There's a trailer screaming online, embedded below.

The Cheer Ambassadors makes its world premiere at 6pm on Friday, January 27 at the World Film Festival of Bangkok at the Esplanade Ratchadaphisek.

Tanwarin's It Gets Better to premiere at Hua Hin fest

The World Film Festival of Bangkok is on, with Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr in town to receive the festival's Lotus Award and to talk after the screening of his latest and what he says emphatically is his last film, The Turin Horse. Ryan Gosling is in Bangkok, to begin filming on Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn's latest, Only God Forgives, and there's yet another film festival happening in the Kingdom, starting January 26, down in Hua Hin, promising to bring in a bunch of big-name celebrities.

Only just announced in December, details about the first Hua Hin International Film Festival have been eking out in the weeks since, but the website is up and they have their program together.

Among the highlights will be the gala premiere of It Gets Better (ไม่ได้ขอให้มารัก) by Tanwarin Sukkhapisit. It's a followup to Tanwarin's Insects in the Backyard, which was banned by the Office of the National Culture Commission for alluding to patricide and depictions of prostitution. .

It Gets Better is an ensemble romance with three stories about transsexual love. Veteran actress Penpak Sirikul stars in one, playing a retired transsexual who travels to northern Thailand and falls in love with a local man who works in a garage. Another has a young man returning to Thailand from the U.S. to find that he's inheritd a gay bar from his father. He then falls in love with a bar employee. She's played by "Bell" Nuntita Khampiranon, whose singing talents surprised a nation on the "Thailand's Got Talent" reality-TV series. A third thread involves a feminine-acting boy sent away to the monkhood, where the novice falls in love with a senior monk.

The trailer is embedded below.

With a focus on films that were big at the box office, other Thai films include the thirtysomething romantic comedies 30+ Singles on Sale and 30 Kamleung Jaew, Pen-ek's Headshot, Thailand's Oscar submission Kon Khon (which didn't make the Oscar shortlist), the GTH horror Laddaland, the teen romance omnibus Love, Not Yet, the teen gangster drama Friends Never Die, The Legend of King Naresuan (parts 3 and 4), and The Unreasonable Man (also screening in the World Film Festival of Bangkok).

There's also a strong selection of films from across Southeast Asia. They include Love Story and Lovely Man from Indonesia (also in World Film Fest), the first Lao thriller At the Horizon (also screening at the Lifescapes fest in Chiang Mai), the Vietnamese director Charlie Nguyhen's hit romance Fool for Love with Dustin Nguyen, Malaysia's Great Days and KL Gangster, Singapore's ,b>It's a Great Great World by Kelvin Tong, Cambodia's Kiles, the Philippines' The Mountain Thief, Niño and Ways of the Sea and the Burmese drama The Moon Lotus.

Touted as "the biggest film industry and cultural event of the year", with an aim to make Hua Hin "the Cannes of Thailand", there are.more than 50 films from more than 15 countries.

Other highlights include the Southeast Asian premiere of The Lady, the biopic of Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, which was partly shot in Thailand. Director Luc Besson and star Michelle Yeoh are expected to be in attendance.

Others expected include David Lancaster, producer of Drive, Hong Kong producer Terence Chang, actor Alex Meraz from The Twilight Saga and the stars of the South Korean romance Always, So Ji-Sub and Han Hyo-Joo.

The program also includes "controversial and uncensored films" like Steve McQueen's Shame with Michael Fassbender and the Taiwanese film Blowfish, as well as David Cronenberg's Freud-Jung flick, A Dangerous Method.

The opening film is Taiwan's Warriors of the Rainbow (Seediq Bale), which just made the shortlist for the foreign-language Oscar.

Money raised from ticket sales goes to flood relief.

The Hua Hin International Film Festival runs from January 26 to 29 at the InterContinental Hua Hin Resort and Major Cineplex, Market Village.