คุณหนูประเทศไท้ย กับกกต.ทั้งเจ็ด (‘Thailand and the election commissioners’)

Rap Against Dictatorship released singles in the days before Thailand’s two most recent elections: 250 Bootlickers (250 สอพลอ) dropped two days before the 2019 election, and I’m the One Who Gets to Decide (คนที่ตัดสินใจคือฉันเอง) came out six days ahead of the 2023 election. Thailand held another election this year, on 8th February, and Rap Against Dictatorship have again released a new single, this time in the aftermath of the vote.

The band’s new song, คุณหนูประเทศไท้ย กับกกต.ทั้งเจ็ด (‘Thailand and the election commissioners’), criticises the Election Commission of Thailand, after allegations of irregularities in the election process. (Even two weeks after the election, only 94% of the votes have been officially counted by the ECT, and there have been protests over the use of QR codes and barcodes on ballot papers.)

The song’s animated video was designed by PrachathipaType, with a hand motif inspired by the Saul Bass film poster for The Man with the Golden Arm. This is the band’s fourth collaboration with PrachathipaType, after Homeland (บ้านเกิดเมืองนอน), กอ เอ๋ย กอ กราบ (‘k is for krap’), and Budget (งบประมาณ).

The ECT were previously criticised over their apparent mismanagement of the 2014 election, when polling stations were understaffed. In fact, an ECT member was even quoted saying that the 2014 election should be cancelled, as it may lead to a coup (although admittedly his prediction was accurate). The 2006 election was invalidated by the Constitutional Court, which ruled that the ECT was biased in favour of the winning party, Thai Rak Thai.

Rap Against Dictatorship’s most famous single is the anthemic My Country Has (ประเทศกูมี). Their other tracks include Sunflower (ดอกทานตะวัน), Burning Sky (ไฟไหม้ฟ้า), Reform (ปฏิรูป), Ta Lu Fah (ทะลุฟ้า), and 16 ปีแล้วไอ้สัส (‘it’s been 16 years, ai sat’).

Censor Must Die

Ing K.’s Shakespeare Must Die (เชคสเปียร์ต้องตาย) was banned by the Ministry of Culture in 2012. In an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored, Ing didn’t mince her words, calling the censor board “a bunch of trembling morons with the power of life and death over our films.” At an event last year, she described her furious reaction when the Administrative Court rejected her appeal in 2017: “อาจจะใกล้เป็นผู้ก่อการร้ายมากที่สุดในชีวิตนะ” (‘that might be the closest I’ve ever been to becoming a terrorist’).

Thai Cinema Uncensored features an insider’s account from a member of the appeals committee, who said he was obliged by his department head to vote against releasing the film: “I had to vote no, because it was an instruction from my director. But if I could have voted freely, I would have voted yes.” The book also includes a complete account of the film’s censorship history.

Ing fought the censors all the way to the Supreme Court, which finally lifted the ban on 20th February 2024. She documented her legal battle in the film Censor Must Die (เซ็นเซอร์ต้องตาย), which follows producer Manit Sriwanichpoom as he files a case with the Office of the National Human Rights Commission. Censor Must Die will be shown at Cinema Oasis in Bangkok tomorrow, to mark the second anniversary of Ing’s Supreme Court victory.

Censor Must Die’s most revealing scene takes place at the headquarters of the Ministry of Culture: in the lobby, a TV plays a video demonstrating polite and respectful Thai etiquette. The video encapsulates the ministry’s didactic and outdated interpretation of Thai culture, and it was parodied by the mock instructional video “How to Behave Elegantly Like a Thai” in Sorayos Prapapan’s film Arnold Is a Model Student (อานนเป็นนักเรียนตัวอย่าง).

Censor Must Die premiered at the Freedom on Film (สิทธิหนังไทย) seminar in 2013. It was shown a few months later at the Film Archive, and had private screenings at Silpakorn University and the Friese-Greene Club. Its first commercial screenings were at Cinema Oasis in 2020, and it has been shown there on a regular basis since 2024.

Delusional

Delusional (หลงผิด), featuring new works by Manit Sriwanichpoom and Akkara Naktamna, opened yesterday at West Eden in Bangkok. The exhibition is the first in the gallery’s Shadow Archives series, and it runs until 12th April.

Delusional examines “the suffocating realities of life” in a quasi-democratic system. Manit takes that description literally, with a series of photographs of people with bags covering their heads, titled Portraits of Thai Citizen (ภาพเหมือนบุคคลพลเมืองไทย). The bags have red, white, and blue stripes, the colours of the Thai flag.

Beyond their metaphorical meaning, Manit’s images also refer to corrupt police chief Thitisan Utthanaphon, who murdered drug suspect Jeerapong Thanapat by suffocating him during an interrogation. The exhibition includes a CCTV video of the incident (ironically retitled How to Become a Thai Citizen), which made headlines in 2021. The killing also inspired a powerful cartoon by Arun Watcharasawad in Matichon Weekly (มติชนสุดสัปดาห์; vol. 42, no. 2142).

The Thitisan case has previously been referenced in two very different films. In the audacious opening sequence of Nontawat Numbenchapol’s Doi Boy (ดอยบอย), a cop with a guilty conscience has flashbacks of himself suffocating an anti-government protester. In contrast, Poj Arnon’s Oh My Ghost! 8 (หอแต๋วแตกแหก โควิดปังปุริเย่) includes a tasteless and offensive scene in which the suffocation is played for laughs by a group of aristocratic women.

Delusional also features Akkara’s Failing Dreams (ล้มฝัน) and Felling Dreams (ฝันล้ม). Failing Dreams is a series of thirteen photographs of Democracy Monument, the images distorted due to interference in a television signal. The implication is that tapping the TV set would briefly rectify the picture, just as protests and elections attempt to restore democracy.

Other artists — Suwaporn Worrasit’s short film Ratchadamnoen Route View 2482+, for example — have used images of Democracy Monument under construction as a metaphor for incomplete democracy, though Failing Dreams goes a stage further. The nearest equivalent to Failing Dreams is perhaps Thunsita Yanuprom and Sarun Channiam’s short film Democrazy.mov, in which a cellphone signal is jammed by a 44GHz frequency, a reference to article 44 of the 2014 interim constitution, which granted absolute power to the leaders of the 2014 coup.

There have been thirteen successful coups in Thailand, and Felling Dreams features photos of the thirteen coup leaders shown on a TV screen. This not only hints at the source of the interference from Failing Dreams, it also refers to television as the traditional medium used to announce Thai coups. (Natthapol Kitwarasai’s short film Coup d’état also includes photos of each coup leader.)

Beyond the Border

Nontawat Numbenchapol’s documentary Boundary (ฟ้าต่ำแผ่นดินสูง) will be shown tomorrow at Kasetsart University’s Faculty of Social Sciences in Bangkok. The screening is part of an event titled Beyond the Border, and will be followed by discussion with Nontawat on the subject of ประเด็นพื้นที่ชายแดนไทย-กัมพูชาในบริบทการเมืองไทยร่วมสมัย (‘the issue of the Thai-Cambodian border in the context of contemporary politics’).

Boundary documents the 2008 conflict between Thailand and Cambodia when the disputed Preah Vihear Temple was exploited for nationalist political gain. But it remains a topical film, as another border dispute between the two countries took place last year, and the issue was a significant factor in Bhumjaithai’s election victory last week.

Anutin Charnvirakul:“Nationalism is in the heart of everybody in Bhumjaithai...”

Anutin Charnvirakul’s Bhumjaithai party achieved an unexpected election win yesterday, with an increase of more than 100 seats since the last vote in 2023. More predictably, Pheu Thai suffered a significant decline, losing almost half of their seats. The People’s Party, which won the last election, lost almost a quarter of their seats, finishing in second place.

At a press conference last night, Anutin said (in English): “Nationalism is in the heart of everybody in Bhumjaithai party.” This goes a long way to explain his election victory, as the defence of the country — following last year’s border war with Cambodia — was central to his campaign. This was in stark contrast to Pheu Thai, whose former leader Paetongtarn Shinawatra was dismissed as prime minister following her obsequious phone call with former Cambodian PM Hun Sen.

Since he became PM last September, following Paetongtarn’s dismissal, Anutin has increased his power base, with dozens of MPs (including fifty from United Thai Nation) defecting from other parties to join Bhumjaithai. The People’s Party must now be bitterly regretting their confidence-and-supply agreement with Anutin, which — from their perspective — has backfired spectacularly. Their only consolation is that they achieved a clean sweep in Bangkok, winning all thirty-three constituencies in the capital.

There are numerous reasons for Pheu Thai’s losses. They ran a campaign that was even more blatantly populist than usual, promising to hold daily lotteries with ฿1 million prizes. Their de facto leader, Thaksin Shinawatra, is in jail, yet the party is still reliant on Thaksin family members — this time, his nephew Yodchanan Wongsawat — for its prime-ministerial candidates. And Pheu Thai have surely lost considerable support since 2023, after breaking their pledge not to form a coalition with pro-military parties.

Yesterday’s votes also included a preliminary referendum asking whether the constitution should be rewritten. There was a majority in favour of a new constitution, with a striking north/south divide: almost all constituencies in northern and central Thailand voted in favour, while almost all constituencies in the south voted against. With the conservative Bhumjaithai in power, any changes to the constitution are likely to be limited.

Petal Camera

The Petal camera was released in Japan in 1948. This minuscule device is barely larger than a coin, though its chrome-plated brass body is reassuringly heavy.

The Petal’s disc-shaped film has six exposures, each only 6mm in diameter, which could be enlarged — into ‘petalargements’ — when processed. The camera has a fixed-focus lens.

It was manufactured by St. Peter Optical, primarily for export, and it was distributed in the US by Mycro Camera in 1949. The original circular Petal was followed by the Everax A (engraved with a floral motif) and a slightly larger Sakura Petal octagonal version.

The Petal is the world’s smallest film camera. It’s significantly smaller than the more famous Minox spy cameras from Latvia and Germany. It’s also smaller and more advanced than the Hit cameras made by Tougodo, which became a generic term for all Japanese post-war subminiature cameras.

Other smallest-ever analogue cameras include:

• Bolsey 8 — the smallest cine camera
• Sony Ruvi — the smallest video camera
• Polaroid iZone 200 — the smallest instant camera

Press Start:The History of Video Gaming

Erwan Cario’s Press Start: The History of Video Gaming was originally published in French as Start! La grande histoire des jeux vidéo in 2011, and its updated English translation was published last year. The back cover describes it as “the most comprehensive history of video gaming ever”, though that distinction really belongs to Tristan Donovan’s Replay.

While Press Start isn’t the most comprehensive video game history, it does have better illustrations than its rivals (except for purely visual surveys like Stephan Gunzel’s Push > Start). The book covers the most significant video games, consoles, and designers, from the experimental oscilloscope game Tennis for Two in 1958 onwards.

Cario describes Shigeru Miyamoto as “the greatest designer of all time”, and argues that Ocarina of Time, from Miyamoto’s Legend of Zelda series, is “considered by many players to be the greatest video game in history.” He writes that Space Invaders was “unquestionably the first title to have a lasting impact on video games and popular culture”, and describes that game’s 8-bit alien character as “the universal symbol of video games.”

Leonard Herman’s Phoenix was the first book on the history of the gaming industry, and Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy was the first analysis of the aesthetics of video games. Thumb Candy, from Channel 4, is the best documentary on the subject.

100 Years of Anime

100 Years of Anime, by Matthieu Pinon and Philippe Bunel, was first published in French (Un siècle d’animation japonaise) in 2017, to mark the centenary of anime (Japanese animation). The book’s English translation was published last year.

Jonathan Clements wrote the definitive history of anime in 2013. 100 Years of Anime is nothing like as scholarly as the Clements book — it has no footnotes, and only a very brief annotated bibliography — but it is better illustrated, with colour photographs on almost every page. Pinon and Bunel are also the only other authors, besides Clements, to write a complete 100-year history of anime.

Clements also co-wrote The Anime Encyclopedia, a uniquely comprehensive guide to thousands of anime titles. His co-author Helen McCarthy wrote the first English-language book on the subject, Anime! A Beginner’s Guide to Japanese Animation.

Watercolor: A History

Marie-Pierre Salé’s Watercolor: A History was published in 2020, translated from the French edition (L’Aquarelle). The publisher, Abbeville, described it in superlative terms as the “most comprehensive and best-illustrated history of watercolour painting ever published.” It’s certainly the best-illustrated history of the subject, and it was printed on premium Munken paper from Switzerland to showcase its 300 watercolour reproductions.

Prior to Salé’s Watercolor, the most recent book on the topic was A History of Watercolor, by Bernard Brett, published more than thirty years earlier in 1984. Brett’s book was nowhere near as lavish as Salé’s, though it was more international in scope, with chapters such as Watercolor Painting in the Far East and Islamic and Indian Miniatures. Salé, on the other hand, covers “the development of watercolor in the West”. (The first book on the topic, A Concise History of Watercolours by Graham Reynolds, was published in 1971.)

Salé, chief curator of prints and drawings at the Louvre in Paris, has written a beautiful and monumental history of European and American watercolours. Abbeville have also published an equally stunning history of pastel painting, The Art of the Pastel (L’art du pastel).

Japanese Film Festival 2026

The Japanese Film Festival 2026 (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์ญี่ปุ่น 2569) will take place in four cities around Thailand, from 13th February to 1st March. The lineup is dominated by contemporary releases, though there will also be several screenings of Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai (七人の侍).

Seven Samurai will be shown at House Samyan in Bangkok on 15th, 16th, 18th, 21st, and 22nd February. It will also be screened at Pratudang Micro Cinema in Khon Kaen, on 28th February. (It was previously shown at Cinema Winehouse in 2018, and there have been two 35mm screenings in Bangkok: in 2010 and 2019.)