Bangkok Asean Film Festival review: Manila in the Claws of Light, Bitcoins Heist

The titan of Filipino cinema, Lino Brocka, always focused on the unfairly exploited working class. His gripping 1975 picture, Manila in the Claws of the Light (Maynila: Sa mga kuko ng liwanag) is the pulpy story of a young man from a fishing village, who comes to the cruel metropolis to track down his ex-girlfriend Ligaya. She was lured away by a pig-woman, with promises of working in a factory and furthering her education. Yeah, right. We all know how that goes.

In rough-and-tumble Manila, he's zeroed in, locating her likely whereabouts to a certain shophouse on Misericordia Street, which he watches like a hawk.

To support his stalking efforts, Julio takes jobs in construction, and, um, other fields.

Much of the film deals with the hardships of big-city construction work, where laborers push wheelbarrows, shovel gravel, haul on ropes and die. They are building the flashy concrete high-rises that inundate the metropolitan skyline. Later, he's laid off from the construction job, and drifts into the sex trade, which Brocka depicts with flamboyantly entertaining flair.

More than a few folks in the classic film's one-off screening at the Bangkok Asean Film Festival were murmuring about how Julio, played by still-steady-working actor Bembol Roco, looked just like Thai action star Tony Jaa. So it turned into an exercise of folks imagining what it would be like if Tony mostly ditched the flying double-knee-drops and just did dramatic acting. Where, indeed, is my elephant?

Anyway, Manila in the Claws of Light is a marvel. And Martin Scorsese was well aware of the film's power. He supported efforts to have a 4K digital restoration done. One of the cinematographers, Mike de Leon, cast his eyes on the laborious wet-scanning process, and shepherded through the color-grading effort, making sure all the grit, grime and blood clearly and vividly pop off the screen with no muss and no fuss. It is Taxi Driver. It is Mean Streets. And it kicks the butts of both those films. (5/5)

Speaking of kicking butts, there's Vietnamese action cinema, which has rapidly grown and matured since the early 2000s arrival of many U.S.-schooled Vietnamese returnees who grew up watching Spielberg movies and working in Hollywood. They jump-started Vietnam's commercial film industry and make solidly mainstream box-office hits in all the crowd-pleasing genres.

Among them is Ham Tran, who made his breakthrough in 2007 with the post-American War drama Journey from the Fall. Since then, he's become solidly involved in the Ho Chi Minh City film industry, racking up a dozen or so credits as editor, including the action films The Rebel and Clash.

Adding writer and director to his name, his latest effort is Bitcoins Heist (Siêu Trộm), an action-comedy-romance that is basically the Vietnamese Ocean's Eleven, with perhaps a bit of Now You See Me tossed in.

So darn slick, I kept sliding out of my seat, Bitcoins Heist enjoyably hits the usual and expected beats of the heist flick, with team assembly, double crosses, triple crosses and sleight of hand.

The attractive and colorful cast is toplined by actresses, chiefly Kate Nhung from Tran's Hollow as Dada, Vietnam's top cyber-crime cop. She is in pursuit of Ghost, a cyber-criminal who remotely takes over people's laptops and demands ransom in bitcoins or else the device will be bricked.

An early attempt at capturing Ghost's accountant Phuc (Thanh Pham) does not go well, and Dada has to turn in her badge and gun. Ngô Thanh Vân, the action heroine from The Rebel and Clash is featured in early scenes as a sexy, tough-as-nails bodyguard to the accountant.

Now working an undercover, off-the-books operation, Dada assembles a team of con-artists, starting with a former boyfriend, the pickpocketing sleight-of-hand specialist Magic Jack (no, it's Jack Magique, he insists), played by the irrepressible Petey Majik, whose acting credits include Tran's How to Fight in Six Inch Heels.

There's a veteran jewel thief and career criminal, played by long-time Ham Tran hand Jayvee Mai The Hiep. He is assisted in thievery by his precocious acrobatic pre-teen daughter (Lam Thanh My).

And, of course, they need a hacker, a plucky young woman whose tech-savvy brother was severely wounded in the film's opening sequence, when the action tumbled into a mobile-phone repair shop. She's Vi, played by freestyling rapper Suboi, who has cyberpunk attitude to spare.

Bitcoins Heist is a welcome genre diversion from the preponderance of Southeast Asian arthouse-focused indie dramas that tend to be programmed at film festivals. It was the Vietnamese entry in the Bangkok Asean Film Festival, running April 22 to 26 at CentralWorld, with movies from all 10 countries of the Asean bloc. Even Brunei was there with the unusual female-focused martial-arts drama Yasmine. Add in the "Asean Classic" selection of three films that included Manila in the Claws of Light, there was something for everyone, and Bitcoins Heist was one for me. (4/5)

See also:

• Bangkok Cinema Scene special: Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2016

Salaya Doc review: The Scala

Note: An encore screening of The Scala has just been added to the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival. It's at noon on Sunday, April 3, at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center.

"What if we're still doing this when we're 50?"

"It would be nice to have that kind of job security."

That exchange from young downwardly mobile tech professionals in the movie Office Space came to mind as I watched The Scala last weekend, the opening film of the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival. A documentary by Thai filmmaker Aditya Assarat, The Scala is an intimate and mournful portrait of Bangkok's last operating single-screen movie palace.

To put a relatable human face on the grand old lady of Siam Square, Aditya chose four theatre employees, all of whom have been working at the Scala since it opened in 1970. Like those Office Space characters, they probably never imagined they'd still be there more than 40 years later doing the same job.

Here are the characters:

• The Caretaker – From vacuuming the carpets to totalling up the day's receipts, the Caretaker does it all. A thin man in a crisp white button-down shirt, he's generally the guy who rips your ticket as you enter. He also washes the linen headrest covers, by hand. Remember that next time you think about wiping your popcorn-grease hands there, you slob. And the Caretaker is never very far away. He's always watching. After two marriages, he now resides with his true love, the Scala, and stays in an apartment on the cinema's roof.
• The Manager – Phuangthong Siriwan was put to work in her uncle's theatre when she was a young woman. Now with a bobbed mop of grey hair, she still carries a youthful gleam in her eyes, a bright spark to let folks know someone's there. She frets over the chipped marble in the Scala's signature curving double staircase, which has become worn under the billions of feet that have made their ascent to movie heaven.
• The Technician – The lights in the marquee. He keeps them lit. The sound in the speakers. He makes sure it's heard clearly. He's the guy behind the guy who ensures the Scala is running smoothly. He's also responsible for keeping the Scala's sister cinema the Lido spruced up. Take note of the new lights on the sign as you pass by next time.
• The Projectionist – Showing movies off a hard drive or satellite network just isn't as much fun as spooling up films for the projector, says the Projectionist, a thin, shaven-headed man who has weathered the recent changes in movie-going technology. He has to make a couple trips back and forth from his spiffy new digital system to the office to get a password to show the film. You will know his pain. Another resident of the Scala, with his own designated sleeping corner, he takes solace in his early morning bicycle rides around Siam Square.

A highlight of The Scala is the cleaning of the five-tier chandelier, a laborious process that requires all hands on deck. You won't believe how they do it, and it's something you have to see to believe.

Running a concise 50 minutes, The Scala overviews the history of the place, which opened in 1970 with the 70-millimetre John Wayne western The Undefeated. It joined a trio of similarly grand Siam Square movie palaces operated by Pisit Tansacha and his Apex group, the Siam, which mysteriously burned in the 2010 anti-government protests, and the Lido, which caught fire in 1991 and was converted to the three-screen multiplex we know today.

Back when the Scala opened, movie-going was something special, and all 1,000 seats in the theatre were filled with patrons, who had dressed in their finest for the evening out. Over the years, the number of seats has shrunk to around 700, with most of the seats taken out to accommodate a large stage that's used for concerts, talk shows and special events, which help supplement the Scala's dribs and drabs of income from movies.

Anywhere else, the Scala probably would have closed ages ago, but with the Tansacha family earning its bones from the Nong Nooch Gardens tourist attraction in Pattaya, the Scala and Lido remain in business out of sheer devotion to the theatres themselves and the loyal staff.

But there's a sinking feeling among the staff, as well as the filmmaker, that the Scala's days are numbered. After all, movie can be watched on phone screens, or at fancy mall multiplexes, all over the country. Siam Square landlord Chulalongkorn University has indicated it is keen on tearing down the old cinemas in order to build more shopping malls, though currently there's an agreement in place to keep Lido and Scala running through 2018.

Part of the Power of Asian Cinema documentary series commissioned for last year's Busan International Film Festival by KBS Busan television, The Scala is an enduring portrait of an endangered landmark. Following the one-off screening at Salaya Doc, Aditya says he's sold The Scala to TrueVisions' Thai movie channel, so keep an eye out for it there later in the year. He also reckons he'll one day screen The Scala at the Scala.

"My real hope is that one day, if the Scala does indeed close, I would hope they can show this at the farewell party," he says.

Related posts:

• Sixth Salaya Doc to open with The Scala
• Festival, festival! Masters and newcomers in Busan

(Cross-published in The Nation)

LPFF 2015 review: Spotlight on Cambodia

The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock 'n' Roll

Cambodia's constant struggle to reconcile its bloody Khmer Rouge past with the ancient legacy of Angkor and the push for modernity in the 21st century were common threads running through five movies at the sixth Luang Prabang Film Festival, which made Cambodia the subject of its first “Spotlight”. It showed there is more to Cambodian cinema than the works of its multi-award-winning veteran leading director Rithy Panh.

Curated in part by Sok Visal, Cambodia’s “Motion Picture Ambassador” to the Luang Prabang fest, the Spotlight devoted a full day to the country’s re-emerging cinema movement, with a diverse selection of four films. The line-up included the documentaries The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll and Still I Strive, martial-arts action in Hanuman and melodrama in The Last Reel. Shown on another day was a fifth Cambodian entry, the cult crime-comedy Gems on the Run, co-directed by Visal.

Cambodia’s “code of women’s conduct”, masked killers and arranged marriages were among the common themes linking the films.

Still I Strive

Referenced in at least three of the entries, that book that holds that Cambodian women should be polite, quiet and dutiful, is promptly tossed out by domineering female protagonists. In Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll, a Phnom Penh bargirl undergoes a transformation from a mouse-like figure afraid of her own voice to a tigress-like diva rocker who could teach a thing or two to Cookie Lyon of TV’s Empire. In The Last Reel, a teenage girl jumps off the back of her gangster boyfriend’s motorbike to take up the mantle of movie producer and actress as she tries to reconstruct the missing reel of a 1970s historical epic. And in Gems on the Run, a plucky gun moll chooses love, and falls for the movie’s unlikely hero, a portly police officer who wants to be a singer.

A masked vigilante is out for revenge in Hanuman, which brings Cambodia’s ancient Bokator “pounding a lion” martial art out of the shadows. And it’s masked men who rob an armored car in Gems on the Run. Meanwhile, both the heroine in The Last Reel and the plus-sized leading man of Gems on the Run are seeking to escape from pending marriages arranged by social-climbing parents.

More martial arts are on display in the jawdropping and surprising documentary Still I Strive, which covers the orphan schoolchildren of the National Action Culture Association, an organization run by veteran actress Peng Phan. Having lost her own family during the Khmer Rouge years, she and her husband devote their lives to teaching arts to the orphans. With heartbreaking individual profiles of students, showing the hardships they faced in broken homes to a life of love and learning at the orphanage, the film follows their efforts to perform for the country’s arts-and-culture patron, Princess Bopha Devi.

Hanuman

Directed by Adam Pfleghaar and A. Todd Smith, Still I Strive has these remarkable youngsters acting in full-fledged dramatic segments, following a parallel quest in ancient times, in which their skills in music, dance, storytelling and stage combat are used to full effect. It's amazing.

The gritty Hanuman, meanwhile, is set in contemporary Phnom Penh, where a masked vigilante rises up to challenge the country’s culture of impunity and take revenge on criminals who killed his father. The masked man is also reunited with his estranged brother, a police officer who has been secretly trying to bring his father’s killers to justice himself. Directed by Italian filmmaker Jimmy Henderson, Hanuman is clearly inspired by The Raid, which vividly brought Indonesia’s pencak silat martial arts to world screens. Along with nods to Thailand’s Tony Jaa and Ong-Bak, Hanuman also revels in the lurid images of Italy’s spaghetti westerns and giallo slashers. It's not going to do for Cambodian action cinema what the The Raid did for its stars (who turn up in the new Star Wars), but it is the start of something, and I hope the Hanuman gang will regroup to make more of these types of films.

The Cambodian Space Project and The Last Reel both dealt with the vibrant Cambodian pop culture of the 1970s. Under the patronage of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, himself a multi-hyphenate musician, producer, director and star of his own movies, Cambodia’s cinematic golden age was paralleled by a rollicking music scene, which emulated American rock ’n’ roll. Both scenes were brought to an abrupt end in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over, emptied the cities and put the populace to work making the country into an agrarian utopia. Intellectuals and artists didn’t fit into that scheme, and were targets for persecution and death.

The Last Reel

The forces of music and film combined in The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll, which surveys the resurgence of Cambodian rock and its revival under an unusual band, the Cambodian Space Project, which began in 2009 when Australian pop-artist and musician Julien Poulson heard the extraordinary voice of bargirl Srey Thy performing karaoke. The two had little in common but music, but it was enough.

The band is similar to another outfit, the U.S.-based Dengue Fever, which were featured on the soundtrack to Matt Dillon’s 2002 made-in-Cambodia drama City of Ghosts and have been the subject of their own documentary. But while that band’s frontwoman Chhom Nimol was influenced by the slain 1970s Cambodian singer Ros Sereysothea, the Cambodian Space Project’s Thy has taken the more earthy and grounded vocalist Pan Ron has her major influence.

Directed by German Mark Eberle, The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock ’n’ Roll follows the band’s journey from the bars to Phnom Penh to music clubs in Sydney, Paris and Hong Kong. Clips include the band’s landmark performance at the Cambodia International Film Festival, providing live musical accompaniment to Georges Melies’ 1902 science-fiction epic A Trip to the Moon, the style of which was emulated by Cambodian filmmakers in the 1970s and by Eberle in fantastic animation sequences that imagined the photogenic Thy as an actress in an Angkorian sci-fi epic. Making the film turned out to be an epic undertaking for Eberle, who at one point was drafted to play bass in the band in order to keep both the band and his film project going.

It was a hit with viewers at the Luang Prabang Film Festival's daytime venue, who gave it the festival’s first Audience Choice Award.

Cambodia’s lost cinematic golden age, artfully covered in French-Cambodian director Davy Chou’s Golden Slumbers, unspools further in The Last Reel, a handsomely mounted melodrama that was the country’s official submission to next year’s Academy Awards. Directed by Kulikar Sotho, who rose to prominence as a location supervisor on Angelina Jolie’s made-in-Cambodia action romp Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Last Reel follows a young woman who discovers old film reels in a dilapidated Phnom Penh movie palace and realizes that the beautiful actress in the movie is her mother. Secrets of her family’s Khmer Rouge past surface as the young women sets out to recreate the movie’s missing final reel, with help from a motley crew of her biker boyfriend, the theater's elderly projectionist and film students.

Gems on the Run

The Last Reel strained my brain with its soap-opera leanings and a time-travelling story that omitted an entire generation between the Khmer Rouge era and the teenagers of today, whose grandparents, not parents, would have been Khmer Rouge cadre and captives. But for reasons of sentimentality, nostalgia and, I suppose, vanity, there was a compression in time that took away from the weight of the film's dramatic heft.

I liked Gems on the Run better, and I told Sok Visal so at one point during the fest. He thought I was kidding, but then he doesn't know me very well. Directed by Visal and his French friend Quentin Clausin, Gems on the Runs is exactly the type of film I actually enjoy, with its sprawling, shaggy-dog tale of a portly police officer who wants to be a singer getting mixed up with an estranged childhood friend, his ladyfriend and stolen diamonds. It is, essentially, a Coen Bros farce made in Cambodia. Visal, whose family made their escape to Thailand and then France during the Khmer Rouge era and made his return to Cambodia in 1993 to produce music, is a first-time filmmaker with Gems. The film was something of a flop on commercial release, though the soundtrack did well. It's got a cult following, of which I'm now a member. Visal, for his part, wants to do a horror film next, and I can't wait to see it.

The rotund leading man, Cheky Athiporn, was a photographer before he got put in front the camera for his eye-popping star turn in Gems on the Run.

Other actors provided more connections between the films in Luang Prabang's Spolight. Among them was actress Ma Rynet, star of The Last Reel who also appears in Hanuman. And the girl’s mother (or should it be her grandmother?) is portrayed by Dy Saveth, a Golden Age star. Saveth, who famously survived the Khmer Rouge era because she missed a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh in 1975, also appears in Cambodian Space Project, imparting advice to the budding diva Thy.

Further talent ties are cemented by the appearance of hard-working actor Rous Mony, who plays the sneering villain in Hanuman, The Last Reel and Gems. I liked to think he was also lurking the background in Space Project and Still I Strive.

Here's Wise Kwai's ratings, for those keeping score:

The Cambodian Space Project: Not Easy Rock 'n' Roll: 4/5
Hanuman: 3/5
Still I Strive: 5/5
The Last Reel: 2/5
Gems on the Run: 4/5

Sok Visal talks about Cambodian cinema with Cambodian Space Project director Mark Eberle. Wise Kwai photo

(Adapted from an article in The Nation)

LPFF 2015 reviews: Above It All, The Search for Weng Weng

Above It All (ນ້ອຍ) – It's the story of two people named Noy who want the freedom to love the way they want to love, not the way society says they should love. One is a gay medical student who has yet to come out of the closet to his parents and the girlfriend from a wealthy family they want him to marry. The other Noy is a Hmong college student who wants to buck eons-old tribal traditions and marry someone of her own choosing, not some stranger her father has found.

Outside of Laos, it'll be hard to explain why Above It All is so gosh-darned groundbreaking. But it is the first Lao feature film to specifically address homosexuality. The Hmong angle is interesting as well. I'm just not sure the two taboo love stories work together, as one might cancel out the potential audience for the other.

Much anticipated in certain circles, Above It All is the sophomore feature from Anysay Keola of the Lao New Wave Cinema collective, who debuted in 2012 with the astonishing thriller At the Horizon. It's best to keep your expectations in check. With Above It All, Anysay seems to have made a conscious stylistic choice to make his movie just like the Lao PDR's public-service and propaganda videos. The performances are old-fashionedly wooden and emotionally flat. The pacing is frustratingly slow. At one point during the film's world premiere as the official opener of the sixth Luang Prabang Film Festival, I could sense the audience's impatience, and folks were murmuring, "go on, kid, tell your dad you're gay." Then, a beat too late, Noy says it, "Dad, I like men." And everyone cheered. I think Lao people are ready for more of these types of films.

The lady Noy, meanwhile, has struck up a friendship with a young man in Vientiane, where she has been working as a waitress to put herself through college. In a way-too-cute coincidence, her man Sack happens to be the other Noy's rock-musician younger brother, the guy who has been a huge disappointment to his father. If only dad knew Sack's brother Noy was gay.

As she's ready to graduate from college, Noy's parents show up, and her father insists that she marry a Hmong gentleman in the U.S., whom she has never met. This is apparently a thing now among the Hmong people in Laos, in which Hmong daughters are being married off to, say, Hmong dentists in Minnesota, to support the impoverished family back home.

Above It All has its moments when it approaches the intensity of At the Horizon. Lady Noy gets to tell off a snotty restaurant customer who is badmouthing Hmong women. She receives backing from Sack. A surreal car-wreck serves to further bind the two stories together, and make the Dr. Noy a hero, possibly redeeming himself in his stubborn father's eyes. (3/5)

The Search for Weng Weng – Wearing an actual pith helmet like he's on an archaeological dig, cult-video purveyor/filmmaker Andrew Leavold descends into the heart of darkness in his obsessive quest to untangle the shrouds of myth from bleak reality in The Search for Weng Weng.

The 2013 documentary is another essential chapter from the 1970s and '80s era of exploitation filmmaking in the Philippines. It was a time the Filipino people would rather forget, so it's been left to foreigner genre-film fans to fill in the blanks. Previously, the scene was overviewed in Mark Hartley's informative and entertaining 2010 documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed!, which has since led to Not Quite Hollywood, covering Ozploitation, and the more recent Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.

In Weng Weng, the Australian Leavold goes to the Philippines to track down clues about one of his obsessions – a 2-foot-9-inch movie star known as Weng Weng. Very nearly forgotten if not for Leavold, Weng Weng was a novelty bit player who was elevated to the level of action star in a string of early '80s spaghetti-and-hotdog westerns and Bond-movie spoofs such as D'Wild Wild Weng, Agent 00 and For Y'ur Height Only.

With the help of old-timer actors, directors, film editors and other friendly characters like "Rene the Legman", Leavold circles ever closer to the depressing truth about Weng Weng, whose tiny, childlike figure was the source of much mirth for movie-goers for just a blip in time. As a public figure, the diminutive Weng Weng (real name Ernesto de la Cruz) was built up into a larger-than-life figure. Trained in martial arts as a child, he was not only a movie star, but also a playboy with multiple girlfriends as well as a secret agent for the Marcos regime. In truth, he was a graceful martial artist, but lived a sad, lonely existence under the control of opportunistic husband-and-wife movie producers, who "adopted" Ernesto and saw him as a yardstick-sized cash cow rather than a human being.

It's full of bizarre revelations, but none are more surreal than when the documentary is hijacked by none other than the Philippines' former first lady Imelda Marcos, who draws Leavold and his band of cult-movie geeks into her rich pageant of self-aggrandizement.

Running just over 90 minutes, The Search for Weng Weng has a running time that belies the epic story of its making, which took eight years and cost Leavold mortages on his Brisbane video shop and brought him to kickstart the Kickstarter era in self-funded indie filmmaking. Such dedication definitely makes Weng Weng a doc you should order. (5/5)

Other films I've caught so far at the Luang Prabang Film Festival include Lao TV star Jear Pacific's latest hilarious horror-comedy-romance Huk Ey Ly 2 (Really Love 2). It had the audience in stitches with its Thai-TV-style slapstick. Judging from crowd response alone, it should be the winner of the festival's new audience award. But will the cheers of the Lao movie-goers translate to the clicks on a tablet screen that are supposed to be made as viewers pour out of the venue?

I was also happy to finally see the Thai country comedy Phoobao Thai Baan Isaan Indy (ผู้บ่าวไทบ้าน อีสานอินดี้), which was released in Thai cinemas last year. Made in the Northeastern Thai province of Khon Kaen, PBTB is a representative of a regional cinema movement of Isaan films that could easily be exported to Laos, to play in the new Platinum multiplex in Vientiane.

Review: Freelance (aka Heart Attack)

• Written and directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit
• Starring Sunny Suwanamethanon, Davika Hoorne, Violette Wautier
• Released in Thai cinemas on September 3, 2015; rated 13+
• Wise Kwai's rating: 5/5

Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's offbeat indie stylishness remains intact in his big-studio directorial debut Freelance, a comedy the GTH studio has marketed as a bright romance involving a man afflicted with a rash and his female doctor. But it’s not really “Doctor, doctor, give me the news” – it’s more a sprawling, dark satire on the creative life becoming enslaved to deadline pressures.

Sure, the pulse quickens as the young female physician played by Davika Hoorne asks leading man Sunny Suwanamethanon to raise his shirt. But the sweet, tentative friendship that develops between them is only a small part of a long movie that in Thai is known by the longer title Freelance ... Ham Puay Ham Phak Ham Rak More (ฟรีแลนซ์.. ห้ามป่วย ห้ามพัก ห้ามรักหมอ).

It’s really about the ups and downs in the career of a freelance graphic designer.

Sunny is Yoon, a worker bee who spends his days and sleepless nights in his apartment, staring at a computer screen, retouching photos for magazine spreads and advertisements. So it’s cleverly ironic when the graphics guy who erases nip slips on fashion models comes down with a pesky skin rash. He at first goes to a private hospital and comes away with the requisite sack of overpriced pills that “may cause drowsiness”. These are of course less than helpful in Yoon’s all-work-no-sleep world, and are quickly chucked in the bin.

The rash persists and spreads and Yoon’s friends start to show concern, so he eventually ends up at one of those dreaded public hospitals. Here’s where Nawapol’s knack for observational humor really kicks in, as Yoon, turning up at the way-too-late hour of 6am, finds himself at the back of a vast intake queue that stretches through corridors and up a flight of stairs. It’s a guaranteed laugh for the audience because we’ve all been there and done that.

And there are a lot of scenes like that, based on the real-life experiences of writer-director Nawapol and his indie-filmmaking pals.

Another example has Yoon turning up at the funeral of a friend’s father. His deadline is looming, so he asks a monk for the temple’s Wi-Fi password and plugs in his laptop right by the casket. It sounds shocking, but some insensitive lunkhead somewhere has probably actually done that. And in the context of the movie, it’s hilarious.

After waiting an eternity in the hospital queue, Yoon finally meets his doctor. She’s Imm, a young resident who’s still studying her medical books. There’s a spark there, an unspoken recognition between the two that their lives are very similar. Although Imm already knows what Yoon is thinking, she can’t determine what’s causing his rash. She can only tell him things everyone knows – exercise, eat right and get plenty of rest. And, oh, don’t scratch.

Yoon makes small changes in his life, such as joining a gym, hitting the hay at a reasonable hour and laying off his beloved 7-Eleven shrimp puffs. But as soon as Yoon’s rash disappears, so do any feelings he might have had for the doctor. “It’s all good, doc,” he coldly tells her on a visit, opting to formally wai her instead of shake her outstretched hand. She’s visibly hurt. And soon Yoon is back to pulling all-nighters and subsisting on cocktails of Red Bull, soda and coffee.

The cast, as always with GTH films, is top-notch. Sunny, a reliable leading man in the studio’s comedy Dear Dakanda (in which he fell in love with a nurse) and last year’s I Fine Thank You Love You, fits the mold as Nawapol’s surrogate, no doubt with much help from the director, who loaned the actor some of his cool T-shirts to get into the role.

Davika takes a welcome turn in a contemporary setting, a more relatable shift from the period characters she’s played, like the ghost in Pee Mak and the tragic heroine of Plae Kao. In Freelance, she’s an achingly lonely figure, a medical student whose insecurity is of little help in the face of her inexperience. This is a view of hospitals and doctors more in line with the TV comedy Scrubs than how they are usually portrayed in Thailand, where the medical profession is held in high reverence.

There are many strong supporting characters, but the most valuable player is Violette Wautier as Yoon’s agent and level-headed best friend Je. She goes from enabling Yoon’s self-destructive work ethic to helping him get back on his feet.

Nawapol cast many other filmmakers in fun cameos in his indie feature Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy. Here, he has a couple of GTH talents. One is Pee Mak director Banjong Pisanthanakun, who steals the scene as a doctor substituting for Imm during one of Yoon’s visits. Another is Bangkok Traffic Love Story helmer Adisorn Trisirikasem, who appears in goofy photos as the soldier boyfriend of Je, and adds to his cult status as a quirky character actor, as also seen GTH’s Hormones TV series.

My only knock on Freelance is that, at two hours and 10 minutes, it probably runs too long. Nawapol knows this, but with a densely packed story that has so much to say, it’s hard to see where he and his editor Chonlasit Upanigkit could’ve made cuts. And Freelance is remarkable in that it sustains its level of interest and energy throughout. With most other commercial Thai films, the excitement tends to peter out after the first 30 minutes.

Freelance, also marketed internationally with Nawapol’s original and now-unnecessary title Heart Attack, represents a further blending of hip, indie-film street smarts with the corporate slickness for which GTH is known. While involvement with a big studio perhaps diminishes Nawapol’s hipster cred, GTH’s much-vaunted “feel-good” formula is subverted, and Thai film culture is much richer for that.

(Cross-published in The Nation)

Related posts:

• In Thai cinemas: Freelance, So Very Very

Salaya Doc 2014 review: The Songs of Rice

• Directed by Uruphong Raksasad
• Screened as the closing film of the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival, March 29, 2014
• Wise Kwai's rating: 5/5

A crowd-pleasing jubilation, Uruphong Raksasad's The Songs of Rice (เพลงของข้าว, Pleng Khong Kao) is a poetic portrait of the various rituals and celebrations that accompany the cultivation of rice in Thailand.

It starts off quietly and gently, with only the sounds of chirping birds and the buzz of insects, and slowly builds up until it explodes. The sounds and tempo then gradually trail off until the movie is right back where it started.

As with Uruphong's previous features, Stories from the North and Agrarian Utopia, genius camerawork is the highlight. Uruphong shoots the moon and then zooms back out to focus on the head of a grasshopper.

He does this a lot, showing you something pretty amazing and then turning the camera to reveal something even more astonishing. One early dramatic scene involves a Buddhist temple blessing procession, featuring worshippers in white parading along a rural road with a pair of elephants. The procession leads to a hilltop temple adorned by a golden stupa. Fans of Agrarian Utopia will recognize the place. If all that isn't enough, there's a guy riding a para-glider, flying around above it all.

The Songs of Rice completes a trilogy for the director. Stories from the North was a compilation of vignettes of the director's neighbors in his native rural Chiang Rai, while Agrarian Utopia followed a pair of farming families as they struggled to make ends meet while growing rice by hand on a single plot of land in Chiang Rai.

That same spot in Thailand's far North is revisited in The Songs of Rice, but Uruphong casts his gaze further afield, filming up and and down the countryside. Places visited include Chon Buri on the Eastern Seaboard, for the water-buffalo races, and in Isaan, the Northeast, the bang-fai (rocket) festival in Yasothon and a visit with the travelling families and their spacecraft-like harvesting machines in Roi Et.

The rocket festival, an annual rite in which homemade rockets are launched in a prayer for fertility and abundance, has been depicted before in such movies as Kim Mordaunt's The Rocket and Panna Rittikrai's Dynamite Warrior. But there's another element of the festival that's probably not as widely depicted – along with the the usual bamboo and blue-PVC-pipe projectiles, there is also the spinning discs that spiral into the sky. These fertilizer-fueled Frisbees are huge – one is hauled in on a 10-wheel truck and placed on the launchpad with a crane. The men use long burning sticks to set off the fuse, made of old monk's robes, and then run and jump for cover behind a mound of dirt. When the rockets work, it's pretty dramatic and beautiful, but when they don't work, it's also pretty dramatic and beautiful.

And is if exploding rockets aren't enough, there's music and dance performances to further liven things up. Cross-dressing men, likely inebriated, bang drums and play traditional instruments. A beautiful transgender person prepares a spicy somtum-and-sticky-rice feast – watch for the symbolism of the mortar and pestle. Steaming sticky sweet dessert is ritually prepared – mounds of it. A granny hula hoops, teetering on the edge of a rice paddy. A rotund dancer waggles her behind to the delight of a provincial governor and other dignataries. A beauty queen rides in a golden cart pulled by water buffalo. It's a rig that the gods could use to fly across the sky.

Communities, young and old, pull together to celebrate. In this time of troubled politics polarizing Thai society, The Songs of Rice is a healing message. It gets back to the basics of stuff that really matters – traditions, culture, spirituality, food and just plain living.

Capping off the closing day of the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival, The Songs of Rice, along with Soundtrack for a Revolution and Cambodian director Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture, left me to ponder what really matters. The right to be treated like a human being. Honoring the haunting memories of family members who died at the hands of a genocidal regime. The act of growing the food that sustains us. These are basic things I think Thailand's warring political parties have lost sight of in their fight to protect their own comparatively petty, selfish interests.

There's nothing really political about The Songs of Rice, but with politics tearing apart the country right now, it's hard for me to come to any other conclusion than I just have.

Related posts:

• IFFR 2014: World premieres for The Songs of Rice, Supernatural
• IFFR 2014: Top Thai indie filmmakers launch Mosquito Films Distribution
• IFFR 2014: Songs of Rice wins Fipresci Award

Luang Prabang Film Festival 2012: Capsule reviews and notes part 3

The Shadow Play Association of Champasak performs live accompaniment to Chang.

The third edition of the Luang Prabang Film Festival wrapped up on Wednesday night with a screening of the 1927 silent Chang: A Drama in the Wilderness, with live musical accompaniment by the Shadow Play Association of Champasak.

Owing to Laos being a former French colony and the screening's sponsors being French, the intertitles were presented in French rather than the original English from the Hollywood version.

In an introduction, it was stated that the film took two years to make, starting in 1924. The film crew set out from Bangkok and made their way to Sayabouri, where they found a thick jungle and an abundant population of elephants and other wildlife. There is confusion over whether the filmmakers knew whether they were in Laos or Siam, though the intertitles state the movie takes place in Siam.

Chang is directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, who had earlier done the docu-drama Grass about the nomadic Bakhtiari goat-herder tribe in Iran, and later went on to make King Kong. Presented as a documentary, Chang is the story of a family whose home is trampled by elephants. They then rally other village men to round up the rogue pachyderms. It was a pure Hollywood fabrication, with the main character Kru the Lao tribesman being an actor who wasn't actually married to his wife in the film. However, the carnage against wildlife is very real. This was before a time when there was Humane Society oversight of films, and before PETA could launch an Internet protest campaign.

The musicial accompaniment consisted of a 14-piece orchestra of traditional instruments, including ranand xylophones, khaen reed pipes, saw bowed instruments, drums, gongs and a phin (lute). The musicians also provided sound effects for axe blows, gunshots, and the various animals, including elephants, tigers and monkeys, as well as the hollering of men. The effect was an entertaining combination of a traditional classical music concert and comedy-variety show. The outdoor plaza, which seats 1,000, was absolutely packed, with everyone's eyes glued to the screen.

Documenting Southeast Asia

The Documenting Southeast Asia panel: Tae, Ian Bromage, Shalahuddin Siregar, Peter Livermore and Bradley Cox.

On Tuesday was the panel discussion, Documenting Southeast Asia. Panelists were "Tae" Thanapanont Phithakrattanayothin, associate producer of Cheer Ambassadors, Ian Bromage, producer of the Vietnamese HIV-and-drugs documentary With or Without Me,  Indonesia's Shalahuddin Siregar, director of the farming documentary Land Beneath the Fog, documentarian Peter Livermore, who had a selection of his work exhibited at the festival's visitor's center, and Bradley Cox, director of Who Killed Chea Vichea?, about the murder of the Cambodian labor leader.

Among the questions posed: "Can you make money off of documentaries in Southeast Asia?"

There was no answer. The panelists all just simply looked at each other in hopes one of them had an answer.

There was much lamentation about the lack of funding, or if there is funding, then the backers, such as NGOs, have a stake in the film and that always skews the documentary's objectivity.

Much of the discussion gravited toward censorship.

Who Killed Chea Vichea? won a Peabody Award and has been aired in the U.S. on PBS television. However, it's banned in Cambodia. Cox said the authorities knew he was making the documentary. He even put in a formal request to interview Prime Minister Hun Sen, but was denied. With many cases of videotapes, Cox eventually left Cambodia, exiting by land through a low-profile border checkpoint. He has't been back since. "I'd be more worried if they did let me in," he said.

In Vietnam, With or Without Me, about two heroin addicts and their different approaches to their addiction, was made with the government's okay, though officials were wary of the coarse language and the men's continued drug use. It was shown on television, but because censorship is more stringent for theatrical exhibition, it wasn't approved for a public screening.

Festival director Gabriel Kuperman, moderating the panel, also answered questions, revealing that there's a three-tiered censorship system for the Luang Prabang Film Festival. Uncontroversial films are okayed for the open-air screening. Controversial ones are okayed for the daytime venue, indoors, with the understanding that few Laotian citizens are likely to attend the screening. The third tier is that the film won't be shown at all.

Further, with cinema growing in popularity in Laos, there's a new law - all foreign films must be dubbed in Lao, though that does not yet apply to the Luang Prabang Film Festival.

Final notes

Doughnut, Gabriel Kuperman and Ananda.

With the addition of panel discussions, the Luang Prabang Film Festival is emerging as an important platform for Southeast Asian cinema.

The guest list this year was headed by Ananda Everingham, who was accompanied by actress Manatsanun "Doughnut" Phanlerdwongsakul. Filmmakers in attendance included Tongpong Chantharangkul (I Carried You Home) and Tom Waller (Mindfulness and Murder). Wichanon Somumjarn (In April the Following Year, There was a Fire) and his producer Anocha Suwichakornpong, whose Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner was also screening, arrived on Tuesday after driving all the way from Bangkok.

A sidebar to the festival featured documentaries by Luang Prabang-based lensman Adri Berger, in his handsomely appointed shophouse screening room at T'Shop Lai. Three titles were shown, Free the Bears, about a bear rescue center near Luang Prabang's Kuang Si waterfall; Portraits from Luang Prabang, featuring profiles of 10 artisans and laborers; and Song of the Lao Elephant, about logging elephants and the struggles to preserve the Lao elephant herd. It was made for KBS television in South Korea.

Filmmaker Sherman Ong led a team from Singapore's 13 Little Pictures to conduct the festival's Film Lab, with 17 participants from Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore taking part in workshops, film production exercises, screenings and networking over six days.

A party last Saturday's opening night provided a chance for much networking and discussion between filmmakers, film experts and fans. More opportunities like that are needed – there should be a designated venue for filmmakers to gather each night.

Most importantly, the festival must overcome its technical problems. They simply cannot be excused. The daytime venue, the Amantaka Hotel, was especially full of glitches. Movies were screened on DVD or Blu-ray on a large flat-screen TV. Two screenings I attended there were ended early by problems with the DVD or the DVD player. Only the hotel staff were in attendance to deal with the problems. It's a pretty lousy setup.

Postcards from the Zoo

Edwin, who like many Indonesians has only one name, directs this quirky comedy-drama about a young woman who has grown up in a zoo. Abandoned there as a child, Lana (Ladya Cheryl) is taken in by the colorful group of homeless people who squat at the zoo. She is raised to learn to care for such animals as the giraffe and hippo, and perform other chores, such as leading tours and operating the cheesy amusement rides. Eventually, the homeless people are told to leave, and so Lana takes up with a mysterious magician who dresses as a cowboy (Nicholas Saputra). She dresses as an Indian maiden to his cowboy, and becomes his assistant for him to throw knives at. Her face is framed in a box where she is cut in half. This leads them to a spa that's really a brothel, where Lana has further formative adventures. Here, she puts her hands on a different kind of animal, which later leads to the urge to reconnect with her beastly friends at the zoo. The world is a zoo, where we are watching other animals, or the animals are watching us. (5/5)

Luang Prabang Film Festival 2012: Capsule reviews part 2

Tolong! Awek Aku Pontianak (Help! My Girlfriend is a Vampire)

Niggling technical problems continued to plague the Luang Prabang Film Festival. On Sunday, Day 2, in its daytime screening venue, the Amantaka Hotel, the DVD failed for Help! My Girlfriend is a Vampire. It was dodgy at the beginning, but continued to play, but by the end, everything seized up. It was the only DVD provided. What I did see was a highly enjoyable throwback to the Hong Kong horror-comedies of the 1980s. More contemporary eyes might see it being influenced by Shawn of the Dead, especially because of its videogame-playing protagonist Bob (Zahiril Adzim) and his afro-haired slacker roommate Pian (Sufian Mohamed). There's a colorful, episodic romance aspect to this that made me think for some reason about Wisit Sasanatiang's Citizen Dog. Help! My Girlfriend is a Vampire is a commercial Malay comedy by James Lee, the Malaysian filmmaker who gained traction on the festival circuit with his slow arty movies like My Beautiful Washing Machine. He's making slick commercial movies like this now though. He earlier made the girls-boarding-school horror Hysteria, but I liked Help! better, thanks to its wacky cast of characters, including he sad-sack Bob, who works at an advertising agency run by two horrible bosses. After a breakup with a stuck-up girlfriend who falls for a biker dude, he and his roommate move to a rundown apartment block. Bob becomes close to a young woman who is actually a vampire. Actually, she's a pontianak, a Malaysian version of a vampire, a female ghost who appears to be a beautiful woman until she pulls a pin from her hair and turns into a fanged monster. Decent makeup and wirework make the vampires jump. Anyway, at some point, I hope to see this movie again, on a DVD or file that actually works. (5/5)

Already Famous

Actress Michelle Chong makes her directorial debut starring in this sunny comedy about a starry-eyed small-town Malaysian girl who goes to Singapore with dreams of being a TV actor. Working in a shop selling televisions, Ah Kiao thinks she can make it big like another native Malaysian, Singapore superstar Christopher Lee. Encouraged by her grandmother, she makes her way to Singapore and works her way up, starting with a job hawking beauty products in a drugstore while she tries to get on at modelling agencies around the city. Eventually, she is picked up by an extras casting agency, which leads to her big break witha bit part in a soap opera. In her spare time, she keeps her eyes glued to the television in a local coffee shop, where she develops friendship with the young man who runs  the place (Alien Huang). Other colorful characters include Ah Kiao's gambling-addicted mother, her pirate-DVD salesman brother and a cohort extra actress who specializes in acting like she's been hit by an explosion. As her fortunes rise, Ah Kiao begins to have misgivings that fame might change her. Singapore's entry to the the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is filled with cameos by local celebrities, which makes it an ideal primer if you're looking to get hooked on Singaporean television. (4/5)

Chanthaly

Laos' first horror film is also the first Lao feature by a female director. Mattie Do's Chanthaly is about a young woman (Amphaiphun Phimmapunya) with a congenital heart defect who's been raised by her overprotective widowed father. The willowy girl has hardly ever left the confines of her gated home. Aside from her father and a female cousin who delivers laundry for Chanthaly to wash and fold for her home-based business, her only contact with the outside world is a neighbor boy. They speak through the fence by a spirit house whenever Chanthaly offers prayers to the shrine. And her father barely tolerates that little bit of interaction. She is haunted by the past, and may have witnessed her mother's suicide attempt. However, her father swears that her mother died in childbirth. The pills Chanthaly takes to keep her heart condition in check may be causing hallucinations, and she believes she is seeing a ghost (Phenmaly Pholsena), and it might be her mother. Later, her father brings a young doctor home, not only to treat her but as a possible suitor. Chanthaly is suspicious of him at first, and demands to know where he was educated – schooled in Paris, he assures her. The helpful doc wants to switch Chanthaly's meds, but doing so will mean the visions she's having of her mother will disappear. Eventually, Chanthaly's disposition grows stronger, and the meek girl is transformed into a headstrong young woman who is determined at all costs to keep the visions of her mother coming. As her character develops, the movie gradually shifts gears to horror, with ghosts in white dresses inhabiting a parallel realm of the house where it's daylight all the time. Gore aspects are kept to a minimum, except for a puddle of blood on the floor. For the most part, the film is quiet and slow-moving, with a minimalist soundtrack – the scares aren't tied to shrieking violins or sound effects, and yet it still managed to have members of the audience screaming. The film also prominently features Mango, the pet dog of the director and screenwriter Christopher Larsen. Possibly the mellowest dog ever in cinema, Mango is the namesake of the film's production company, Sleepy Whippet. Chanthaly was supposed to be the opening film of the third Luang Prabang Film Festival, however a problem with the digital file prevented that from happening and caused embarrassment for the festival organizers in front of various dignitaries. Luckily, another Lao film in the program, Huk Aum Lum, was pulled at the last minute because of a conflict with a distributor, so a later spot was opened for Chanthaly. What was screened on Monday night was a work print, so perhaps the film's slow pace will pick up speed in the final cut. (4/5)

10th WFFBKK capsule reviews: Mekong Hotel, Parts of the Heart, Return to Burma, Elephant Shaman

Mekong Hotel – A lullaby to fans and cinema, I believe that Mekong Hotel is a transitionary work for Apichatpong Weerasethakul, perhaps signaling a move away from feature films toward more shorter art films. He talks a bit about that in a recent Nation interview. Mekong Hotel is rife with commentary about Thai society and politics that goes way over the heads of foreign audiences, which is why, since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, it's left overseas audiences largely puzzled. There are things said that are left untranslated in the subtitles. There's so much subtext, I can't even begin to explain it. Mekong Hotel will speak volumes to Thai audiences and perhaps even experts of Thai culture, but for ordinary movie lovers (like me), that subtext will not register. It's a mixture of experimentalism and storytelling, with workshop footage of his actors for another project called Ecstacy Garden. The actors, including Apichatpong's longtime cast members Sakda Kaewbuadee and Jenjira Pongpas, engage in dialog that alternates between conversation about their real lives and talk about the gut-munching pob ghost. Jenjira is a mother pob ghost who laments passing on her eternal curse to a daughter. They surreptitiously feast on bloody, raw meat. Throughout it all, a classical guitarist noodles on a Brahms-like tune by a famous Thai composer. It beckons heaviness of the eyelids. Shot at a riverside hotel on the Mekong in Nong Khai, Laos is across the waters, prompting talk of Lao refugees. The film was made last year around the time that Bangkok and the central plains were heavily flooded. One character comments that the floods are the tears of the Emerald Buddha, a controversial icon that's still a sore point in Thai-Laotian relations. At the end, the focus is on jetskis on the river as they circle about, making figure eights – more subtext that I can't explain. (4/5)

Parts of the Heart – The struggles of being an out-and-proud gay man in Indonesia are examined in this comedy-drama by Paul Augusta. The life of a gay guy named Peter is tracked in eight segments, with the character played by different actors. It runs from boyhood, when Peter is Boy Scout and he steals a kiss from his best friend and tentmate. Next, the two friends are in their early teens. They confide their long-buried feelings for one another and experiment in heavy petting. In subsequent segments, the goth-attired Peter is in a deep depression over loss and breakups, and dealing with boyfriends who won't commit to an open relationship. A colorful circle of campy friends emerges, bringing comic relief to Peter's sadness and self-pity. A particularly funny segment has Peter and his boyfriend engaging the help of another friend in finding a partner for their threesome, in which they audition various applicants from a gay matchmaking website. Filmmaker Joko Anwar portrays Peter in another segment, The Couch and the Cat, in which a happily situated couple shares a coach with an extremely hairy feline. Their life has become routine, and they appear content to just watch TV and smoke (What would an Indonesian film be without lots of smoking?) When his partner starts sneezing, Peter is forced to act. The story comes full circle with Peter happily married to a husband and running a coffeeshop in Jakarta. A young customer who is going through many of the same problems Peter had in his youth comes in. Peter is tempted but comes up with a more-constructive solution. (4/5)

Return to Burma – Taiwan-based Myanmar filmmaker Midi Z directs this loosely autobiographical tale of a young man returning home after years of working as construction laborer in Taipei. Ostensibly, he's making the trip home to deliver the ashes of a friend who was killed in a construction accident. He's been away so long, that when he finally arrives at his home, he has to introduce himself to his mother. He then sets about to reaquaint himself to the hard realities of the country where much as changed but other things have not changed at all. At the time of filming, Burma was preparing for elections that would pave the way for much-heralded democratic reforms. But the lives of ordinary people haven't changed much. They still must struggle mightily just to make a little money and earn a living. Throughout the film, the young man Xing-Hong probes for an angle, asking everyone he meets if there's work, how much it pays, how much to set up a business, etc. Meanwhile, his brother and other friends are preparing to head to Malaysia to find work. Others talk about working in China, and bad experiences there. Shot on the fly, documentary-style, it's an engrossing portrait and it's easy to forget that a camera crew is involved. You feel like you are right there beside Xing-Hong, step by step with him (except for when he visits a brothel; the camera takes a time out as Xing-Hong is led across the street to the sex den). Later, there's a brief respite from Xing-Hong's wanderings as the camera focuses on children playing with toy guns. A boy and a girl reenact the diner robbery scene from Pulp Fiction. Without all the swearing, it's cute. Other kids engage in a battle, and everyone ends up "dead". Most of the action takes place in a border state populated mostly by Yunnan people who speak the Chinese dialect – a reminder of the diversity of Myanmar's population. In the end, the message is reinforced that no matter what's happening with Myanmar politically, not much has changed for most folks, who have few other choices than to toil away in hardship. (5/5)

Elephant Shaman – Anyone who's watched the Tony Jaa martial-arts movies featuring elephants might be interested in checking out director Shane Bunnag's National Geographic documentary Elephant Shaman, which delves into the mysticism and symbiotic relationship between man and pachyderm in the northeast of Thailand. Bunnag's hour-long doc is an important chronicle of the dying custom of the Kuy people, who were known for their work with elephants. At the centre is an 85-year-old man named Miw, the last elephant shaman. He holds the highest ranking among the Kuy people who handle elephants, a sadam, or senior priest. Other rankings include jaa, a senior handler, and ma or mahout, the most junior. Long ago, the kuy elephant handlers and trackers played a key role in Siamese culture, capturing, training and caring for the elephant herds that were used by armies, loggers and in royal and religious ceremonies. According to tribal custom, their methods could only be passed on in the jungle, during the hunt. Today, the jungles have been mostly cleared, with only small tracts of wilderness left. Elephants are only used by man for two purposes – hauling tourists around or begging on the streets. There is no elephant hunt, so there's no chance for Miw to pass on his knowledge. However, an opportunity for one last hunt arose when a rogue bull elephant started trampling crops. Out of desperation, the Wildlife Department called on Miw to capture the beast. Returning the stubborn 15-year-old wild bull to his herd was deemed impossible, so it was left to Miw and his followers to tame and care for the elephant. It might be difficult, in this day and age, to see a need for men like Miw, but Bunnag makes the case that we need them now more than ever because the borders between men and wilderness have broken down. The elephant shamans, with their respect for the remarkable beasts, are needed to protect the elephants from poachers and overdevelopment, and preserve a way of life that shouldn't be forgotten. (5/5)

Capsule reviews: 36, Fighting Fish, Yak, In April

Due to time constraints, I've let several recent Thai films pass under the transom without writing any actual reviews. Here then is an attempt to remedy that situation.

36

Winner of this year' New Currents Award at the Busan International Film Festival, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's 36 was hailed for its inventiveness by the jury led by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. Indeed, 36 takes a uniquely spare, minimalist approach in telling the story of a film-company location scout (Vajrasthira Koramit) who gets into a relationship with an art director (Wanlop Rungkamjad). After the guy moves on, she struggles to reconstruct those memories after a hard-drive crash erases the photos she took with him. Nothing, it seems, is the way she remembers. The film is comprised of 36 scenes, each a single-camera set-up, preceded by a title card. They feel like the pages of a storybook. The camera angles, sometimes close and sometimes from far away, are often odd and obscure the faces of the actors. Or, the light sources will cause things to be obscured or fragmented, just like the memory on that broken hard drive. It's the debut feature from Nawapol, a young filmmaker whose varied career has included making many award-winning short films, writing a film column for a magazine, scripting mainstream films at big Thai studios and organizing screenings of indie Thai short films. He self-released 36 to sold-out screenings at alternative venues around Thailand before taking it to Busan. It'll be interesting to see what he can come up with if he's ever given a big-studio budget and support. (5/5)

Fighting Fish

Bromance forms between a foreigner and a Thai boxer in Fighting Fish (ดุ ดวล ดิบ, Du Duan Dib), a welcome Thai martial-arts movie, which have become a rarity in local cinemas, except for Tony Jaa films every two or three years. Stuntman Jawed El Berni stars as a mysterious expat who checks into a five-star Bangkok hotel and then falls for the oldest trick in the book when he's taken for a ride in a tuk-tuk to a boxing match and is then robbed. He runs in to further trouble when he sells his gold watch to a hilarious pair of pawnbrokers (real-life twin-brother boxing champs Khaosai and Khaokor Galaxy). He's then cheated out of his last bit of cash of by street hustler ("JJ" Jakkris Kanokpojnanon) who turns out to be an expert Muay Thai fighter. A run through back alleys and an electronics factory echoes the rough-and-tumble street chase of Ong-Bak. Afterward, the guys become best pals as they enter matches in an underground cagefight club. But there's conflict again when the foreigner talks his way into the top-tier to-the-death "fighting fish" matches. There's lots of gritty, sweaty close-quarters boxing action, which is choreographed by David Ismalone ("Mad Dog" from Ong-Bak) who also stars as a vicious top henchman. The story is scripted by David's wife "Ying" Julaluck Ismalone, a former model and VDO star who makes her directorial debut. The wafer-thin plot provides just enough motive for the two protagonists – the foreigner is desperate for cash and redemption while his Thai buddy has a disabled wife who needs an expensive operation. The soundtrack keeps it real by being mostly in English despite it being hardly anyone's first language. Other stars include Ong-Bak baddie Suchao Pongvilai as the gangster in charge of the fight club, Raging Phoenix leading man Kazu Patrick Tang as a fighting fish combatant and former boxer Somluck Kamsing as a dogged police detective. (3/5)

Yak: The Giant King

From its look and setting, Yak: The Giant King (ยักษ์) might be most often compared to such Hollywood animated features as Blue Sky Studio's Robots or Pixar's Wall-E. But it's really closer to Brad Bird's traditional animation The Iron Giant, as it tells the story of a giant robot who is gentle and kind but is actually a weapon of mass destruction. The tale, inspired by the Ramayana, is set in a post-apocalyptic future when only robots exist. It's a million days after a big battle between the army of the little monkey robot Hanuman and the giant Totsakan. The two combatants awaken to find their memories wiped. They are joined together by an indestructible chain that's attached to Hanuman's rear end. They then set off on an adventure to break the chain and find out the truth of their identities. Interestingly, Yak, produced by Work Point Entertainment and released by Sahamongkol Film, was offered in Thai cinemas with a Thai soundtrack as well as a well-done English soundtrack. The highly polished English version was supervised by Thailand-based American musician Todd "Thongdee" Lavelle, who also penned several catchy tunes. The animation is about as artful as can be possible when ramshackle robots are involved. However, it's unclear as to what kind of audience it might attract. The action might be too intense for small children, but there are long moments when the robot pals are just walking and talking that might make it boring for grown-up animation geeks. The slack times are made up for by the end with a climactic battle, in which Totsakan's fearsome power – 10 evil little heads and 10 arms that think independently, just like Spider-Man's Dr. Octopus – is revealed. (3/5)

In April the Following Year, There was a Fire

The long title might come off as pretentious, but it's really not. Lifted straight from a line of dialogue about a childhood tragedy, In April the Following Year, There Was a Fire (สิ้นเมษาฝนตกมาปรอยปรอย, Sin Maysar Fon Tok Ma Proi Proi), is a heartfelt and laid-back stream-of-consciousness recollection of filmmaker Wichanon Sumumjarn's own life, growing up in Northeast Thailand. It starts off rather puzzlingly, with someone collapsed on a beach and rescuers shouting for "beach morning glory". The story then follows a young man who works as a supervisor on construction projects in Bangkok. Tossed out of work by the political instability of Thailand, he goes back home to Khon Kaen, ostensibly to attend a friend's wedding but mainly to spend his days boozing and crashing on his father's couch. Midway through the 70-minute debut feature, Wichanon switches from fictional narrative to documentary, interviewing his father as well as his brother, who bears the scars of a jellyfish attack. "You can't just tell it like that. You have to use some technique," the brother says in an unscripted moment as he's being quizzed about that painful incident at the beach in which the morning-glory folk remedy was rubbed too hard. Other humorous self-referential moments come earlier in the movie, when the construction foreman Nuhm happens by a movie-location shoot and strikes up a conversation with one of the film crew about whether the indie movie he's working on will ever be released in theater or come out on DVD. "You never know about these things," the guy tells him. However, in a hopeful sign, Wichanon and his producer Anocha Suwichakornpong did manage to secure a limited release for In April in Bangkok cinemas after it premiered at the Rotterdam festival this year and toured the festival circuit. So there's hope yet for Thailand's hard-working underfunded indie directors. (4/5)

Review: Echo Planet

• Directed by Kompin Kemkumnird
• Starring Nuengtida Sopon, Atipitch Chutiwatkhajornchai, Noppan Jantarasorn, Kongdej Jaturanrasamee
• Released in Thai cinemas on August 2, 2012; rated G.
• Wise Kwai's rating: 5/5

A historic triumph for Thai animation, Echo Planet (เอคโค่ จิ๋วก้องโลก, Echo Jew Kong Loke), is an entertaining and handsomely rendered tale with an environmental message.

The first Thai animated feature to be released in 3D, Echo Planet is the latest effort by Kantana Animation and Kompin Kemkumnird, a Cal Arts graduate and veteran of Disney and Blue Sky Studios in the U.S. who made his debut as a director with 2006's Khan Kluay, a nationalistic tale of a plucky little war elephant in old Siam.

Echo Planet should appeal to a broader international market with its story of environmental doom and three children who are on an adventure to save the world.

It's also distinctly Thai – something that sets it apart from the Pixars, the Dreamworks and other outfits that feed the Hollywood machine – tapping into traditional folk wisdom and spiritual beliefs, but not in ways that are preachy or boring. Along with sumptuous background scenery of the Thai jungle and stunning rock formations, there's also wildlife that's native to the region – this is probably the first movie ever made that features the tapir, a pig-like jungle mammal, as a comic-relief character.

The environmental message is simplified by turning the phenomenon of global warming into a monster, actually a bunch of little monsters that invade our gadgets and machines and turn them against us. Acronym-loving scientists in the movie call these things Biologically Unified Carbon Threats, or B.U.C.T.s for short.

It's while the sky is cracking and the B.U.C.T.s are starting to invade when the World Scout Jamboree is being held in Thailand. One of the star attendees is Sam, the son of the president of Capital State. The country, the most advanced in the world, is a thinly veiled stand-in for the U.S. In a satiric nod, the red, white and blue flag of Capital State has a UPC symbol instead stars in a blue patch on a field of red and white horizontal stripes.

On a hike, Sam's GPS gadget goes haywire and he gets lost. He's rescued by a brother and sister from the Karen highland tribe. The little boy is Jorpe who can talk to animals and trees by touching his forehead to them. His tough older sister Norva wears the traditional Karen neck-stretching rings, giving her a distinct ethnic appearance. Wielding a bamboo staff, she's also a fierce fighter, bringing to mind the Thai live-action heroine Jeeja Yanin.

First, the kids have to get past their differences. The Westerner Sam is typically arrogant. He doubts the Karen ways and shows ingratitude for the smelly folk remedies they use on him after he plunges to what should have been his death. The Karen kids are suspicious of the foreigner and his high-tech gadgets.

Eventually, the three of them, plus Jorpe's pet tapir – a spin-off possibility – set off on an adventure in which they have to stop a project that will cause environmental havoc. Under the president of Capital State's leadership, the U.N. and the world scientific community plan to combat the B.U.C.T.s with a device called the Cool Bomb. But Jorpe, having talked to the trees, discovers that the cool bomb will cause even greater destruction. The only solution is to switch off the power and stop feeding the B.U.C.T. critters.

Partial credit for the script, which should appeal to little kids as well as their hipster parents, goes to Kongdej Jaturanrasamee, one of several scribes listed. Kongdej is also roped in to voice the president of Capital State and is able to draw on his experience as a film director himself to project that god-like authority.

Other voices include actress-singer "Noona" Nuengtida Sopon from Hello Stranger as Norva, kid actor Atipitch Chutiwatkhajornchai as Jorpe and Noppan Jantarasorn is Sam.

It should be a no-brainer for a Hollywood studio to pick this up, put some big names in the voice cast and give it a good release in the U.S.

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• Thai animation enters the 3D age with Echo Planet