
Wednesday, 28 February 2018
Freedumb

Thursday, 22 February 2018
Lahon W Bass
Lebanese comedian Hicham Haddad has been charged with defamation of a foreign leader after he joked about Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. On his television show Lahon W Bass, broadcast by LBCI on 2nd January, Haddad mocked the Crown Prince's human rights record. The editor of ad-Diyar newspaper (الديار) is facing a similar charge: defamation of King Salman of Saudi Arabia, following an article he wrote last November.
After being charged with defamation on 26th January, Haddad appeared on his show four days later wearing a prison uniform. This led to further charges of mocking the judiciary. Marcel Ghanem, the presenter of another show on the same channel, is also facing criminal charges. An episode of Ghanem's Kalam Ennas (كلام الناس) programme, broadcast on 16th November last year, featured a guest who criticised Lebanese President Michel Aoun, amongst other government figures.
After being charged with defamation on 26th January, Haddad appeared on his show four days later wearing a prison uniform. This led to further charges of mocking the judiciary. Marcel Ghanem, the presenter of another show on the same channel, is also facing criminal charges. An episode of Ghanem's Kalam Ennas (كلام الناس) programme, broadcast on 16th November last year, featured a guest who criticised Lebanese President Michel Aoun, amongst other government figures.
Hard Mode

La grande illusion

Indie in Salaya


Monday, 19 February 2018
Visual Vinyl

The subject was finally "sufficiently documented" by Visual Vinyl, a 2015 exhibition of records from the collection of Jan van Toorn. The catalogue of that exhibition, published last year, explores the intersection of records and visual art: album covers designed by artists, and artists' records. It features examples from the 1950s onwards, including early Dada and Fluxus records.
The book claims that "Visual Vinyl provides the first comprehensive overview of so-called "artists' covers" - record jackets with ground-breaking designs by contemporary artists." That's not strictly true, because the more comprehensive Art Record Covers was published first, but Visual Vinyl is unique because it also includes images of the records themselves (pictures discs and illustrated labels), box sets, and inserts.
The first illustrated album covers were designed by Alex Steinweiss in the 1940s. Richard Evans' book The Art of the Album Cover covers sleeve design from Steinweiss onwards. Nick de Ville's Album: Classic Sleeve Designs is the most comprehensive guide to the history of album covers.
Sunday, 18 February 2018
One Stand-up Filmmaker

ตัวตนโดยตัวงาน

Friday, 16 February 2018
เนื้อกับหนัง

Eat Play Love Film Festival


Appropriately, the screenings will be at ChangChui in Bangkok, where a restaurant also called Insects in the Backyard opened last year. (It's more than just a name, as the restaurant specialises in fried insects. They also have a take-away service: giant water beetles preserved in jars of olive oil.)
Insects in the Backyard premiered at the World Film Festival of Bangkok in 2010, and was promptly banned. It was eventually released, with a single cut, late last year, and will be shown at the Thai Film Archive on 24th February.
My Story





When The Terror of War was first published, on 9th June 1972, Phú personified the Vietnam War's thousands of civilian victims. Kevin Carter's photograph of a starving Sudanese child, and Nilufer Demir's picture of the Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, are among the very few images with a similar impact. (Famously, Carter did not provide any assistance to the child he photographed, whereas Út took Phúc to hospital immediately after taking her picture.)
Út's photograph has been painted in blood by Kosit Juntaratip for his Allergic Realities exhibition, and photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom created a consumerist parody of it, This Bloodless War. My Story opened at the Leica Gallery on 8th February, and will close on 30th April. The exhibition is also being shown simultaneously in Singapore.
Thursday, 15 February 2018
นโยบาย by ประชาชน
Internal Security Operations Command, a division of the Thai army, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Isma-ae Tae, a human rights activist. The charge relates to an episode of the Thai PBS television programme นโยบาย by ประชาชน, broadcast on 5th February. In the programme, Isma-ae alleged that he had suffered physical abuse while held in detention by the army.
Isma-ae was detained in 2008, along with five other students, and was released without charge after nine days (two days beyond the maximum legal limit). He filed a civil claim for compensation, and was awarded ฿255,000 in damages for unlawful detention in 2011. (This was increased on appeal by a further ฿50,000 in 2016.)
Defamation is a criminal offence in Thailand, and libel charges are sometimes used to silence whistle-blowers and investigative journalists. In another case involving Thai PBS, a mining company sued a high school student who claimed that a river had been polluted. (The case was later dismissed.) The Nation newspaper was sued for a similar reason. (That case was settled out of court.) Also, a BBC correspondent faced a lawsuit after accusing a lawyer of fraud. (The plaintiff later dropped the case.)
Isma-ae was detained in 2008, along with five other students, and was released without charge after nine days (two days beyond the maximum legal limit). He filed a civil claim for compensation, and was awarded ฿255,000 in damages for unlawful detention in 2011. (This was increased on appeal by a further ฿50,000 in 2016.)
Defamation is a criminal offence in Thailand, and libel charges are sometimes used to silence whistle-blowers and investigative journalists. In another case involving Thai PBS, a mining company sued a high school student who claimed that a river had been polluted. (The case was later dismissed.) The Nation newspaper was sued for a similar reason. (That case was settled out of court.) Also, a BBC correspondent faced a lawsuit after accusing a lawyer of fraud. (The plaintiff later dropped the case.)
Wednesday, 14 February 2018
Jan Dara: The Beginning (DVD)

For its theatrical release in 2012, Jan Dara: The Beginning was cut to obtain an '18' rating, though a Thai senator started a brief moral panic by complaining that it was still too sexually explicit. (The film has plenty of topless nudity, which is rare in mainstream Thai cinema.) The Ministry of Culture responded by requiring cinemas to check audience-members' ID cards at the box office.
According to the Film and Video Act, age verification is only required for films rated '20', while the lower ratings ('13,' '15', and '18') are purely advisory. The exceptional (and illegal) ID-check was not widely enforced by cinemas, and the film had already been playing for a fortnight before the policy was confirmed. The DVD is uncut (almost half an hour longer), and rated '20'.
Monday, 12 February 2018
Doc Club Theater

When I interviewed Pen-ek in 2014, he emphasised how politically sensitive Paradoxocracy was: "half of the footage that we have, you can't show to people. You'll just have to bury it in the ground somewhere." His new film, Samui Song (ไม่มีสมุยสำหรับเธอ), is still on general release.
Tuesday, 6 February 2018
Peace TV

The NBTC's ruling relates to three episodes of Democracy (ทิศทางประชาธิปไตย), broadcast on 4th, 10th, and 11th October 2017. The channel's licence was suspended for thirty days last year and in 2016. Its licence was revoked in 2015, though that ruling was overturned by the Administrative Court.
Samui Song

Vi, the actress, feels typecast in bitchy lakorn roles, and asks her agent for an audition with an (unnamed) arthouse director. The agent (echoing a civil servant's comment about Apichatpong Weerasethakul) dismisses his films as boring, and insists that Thai audiences prefer lakorn. In a metafictional twist, the 'boring' film the agent describes is Pen-ek's Invisible Waves (คำพิพากษาของมหาสมุทร), Vi is played by real-life soap star Chermarn Boonyasak, and Samui Song is as melodramatic as any lakorn series.
Vi's husband, Jerome, is rich and successful though sexually impotent. In one sequence, he tries to jerk off, though he remains flaccid. (Surprisingly, the film was released uncut with an '18' rating despite its male frontal nudity.) Jerome is a devotee of a cult-like Buddhist sect, and he even allows its leader to rape Vi. (The sect, whose members wear grey rather than saffron robes, is based partly on the corrupt Wat Dhammakaya.) Pen-ek appears in a TV interview with the cult leader, making merit in the vain hope that his film will be a box-office hit.
Engaging hitmen have featured in several of Pen-ek's films - Invisible Waves, Headshot (ฝนตกขึ้นฟ้า), Fun Bar Karaoke (ฝันบ้าคาราโอเกะ) - and Guy, the hitman in Samui Song, is the film's only multidimensional character. (He's a contract killer, yet he also cares for his sick mother.) Guy bludgeons Jerome with a phallic sculpture (as in A Clockwork Orange), though things take a Hitchcockian turn when the murder goes wrong (shades of Dial M for Murder). There is also a Buñuelian influence, specifically from [possible spoiler alert] That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir).
At key points in the film, Pen-ek jumps forward in time elliptically, leaving gaps in the narrative. Vi and Guy eventually seem to disappear from the story altogether. In their place, three new characters are introduced: a lesbian couple and their young son. How much of what happens are we supposed to believe? It's possible that the entire plot is a film-within-the-film, the Pen-ek project that Vi initially wanted to audition for. The twist ending offers no resolution to this satisfyingly ambiguous film.
Friday, 2 February 2018
L'Inhumaine

The restoration of L'Inhumaine, which includes its original colour tinting, is flawless. The film was restored by Lobster Films, who previously rediscovered the hand-coloured version of A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) and produced a stunning restoration of Man with a Movie Camera (Человек с кино-аппаратом).