Confessions II

2026 is a return to the Confessions era for Madonna, as she will release a new album, Confessions II, on 3rd July. The album is a sequel to her critically-acclaimed, disco-inspired Confessions on a Dance Floor from 2005.

The first single from the new album, I Feel So Free, will be released digitally on 17th April. I Feel So Free begins with a verse that’s spoken rather than sung, like Future Lovers from Confessions on a Dance Floor but with better lyrics. (In Feel So Free, Madonna describes how she wants to “create a new persona, a different identity”.)

Confessions II will be released on vinyl, CD, and cassette, in multiple versions. The standard album has twelve tracks, and deluxe editions have sixteen songs. Some versions are arranged as a continuous mix, with each song fading into the next, as on Madonna’s You Can Dance album.

Confessions on a Dance Floor was also released as a continuous mix on CD, though its original vinyl release was a more traditional format with individual tracks. The continuous version of Confessions on a Dance Floor was finally issued on vinyl earlier this year, followed by a vinyl edition of the Confessions Tour (previously available on CD), which was issued as a Record Store Day release.

Confessions II is Madonna’s first studio album since Madame X, which came out seven years ago. The decision to revisit Confessions could be seen as a return to form after the failed experiment of Madame X, though it also feels regressive, especially as Madonna’s other recent releases — EPs based on Ray of Light and Bedtime Stories — have also harked back to her earlier albums.

Donald Trump v. The Wall Street Journal

Donald Trump’s $20 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal has been dismissed by a US District Court. In a written judgement published today, Southern District of Florida judge Darrin P. Gayles made it very clear that Trump had failed to establish that the Journal had acted with ‘actual malice’, the legal standard required for defamation cases filed by public figures in the US. Gayles wrote: “The Complaint comes nowhere close to this standard. Quite the opposite.”

Last year, the Journal, reported that Trump had sent child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a salacious letter on Epstein’s fiftieth birthday. In a front-page story published (in late editions) on 18th July 2025, the newspaper quoted Trump’s birthday greeting to Epstein: “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

The text was enclosed within a drawing of the outline of a nude woman, and Trump signed the letter in the position where the woman’s pubic hair would be. A thick marker pen, Trump’s preferred type, was used for the drawing and signature. The letter was part of an album compiled in 2003 by Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell — who is also a child sex offender — containing letters and cards from Epstein’s friends, including Trump.

Trump was a close associate of Epstein’s who attempted to distance himself once Epstein’s crimes were revealed. The WSJ article — written by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo, and headlined “Trump’s Bawdy Letter to Epstein Was in 50th Birthday Album” — included denials by Trump, and quoted him as saying: “I’m gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else”.

Safdar and Palazzolo were named in Trump’s lawsuit, as was media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of the WSJ. Trump posted on Truth Social on 18th July 2025: “I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But now he has, and I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper.” His lawsuit sought $10 billion in damages for defamation per se, and a further $10 billion for defamation per quod (that is, implicit defamation).

A copy of the letter was released by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on 8th September 2025, and the newspaper cited this as clear evidence that its story was true. In today’s ruling, the judge noted that the letter described by the Journal and the copy released by the committee “appear identical”, though he did not make a judgement about the accuracy of the newspaper’s reporting: “Whether Trump was the author of the Letter or Epstein’s friend are questions of fact that cannot be determined at this stage of the litigation.”

Murdoch has a chequered history with Trump, as does the Journal. In an editorial at the beginning of last year, the newspaper called Trump’s proposed 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada “The Dumbest Trade War in History”. Murdoch was quoted calling Trump a “fucking idiot” in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury.

Trump’s lawsuit against the WSJ was the first time that a sitting American president had ever sued a media organisation. He has subsequently filed a lawsuit against The New York Times and the authors of Lucky Loser, and he sued the BBC after Panorama edited one of his speeches.

Trump has sued numerous other media figures and news organisations over the years as a private citizen, including Bill Maher and CNN. He sued Bob Woodward for copyright infringement, though that case was dismissed. His lawsuit against E. Jean Carroll was also dismissed. His unsuccessful lawsuit against Timothy L. O’Brien’s book TrumpNation sought $5 billion in damages.

Trump has never won a libel case in court, though he has received settlements in two cases. ABC settled after he sued them in 2024. He sued CBS later that year, and they also agreed to an out-of-court settlement.

Occasionally, Trump has filed defamation suits indirectly via his organisations or relatives. His brother sued their niece, Mary Trump, in 2020, though the case was dismissed. A suit filed against the NYT by his presidential campaign also failed. His wife won undisclosed damages from The Daily Telegraph in 2019, and she was awarded $3 million in damages from the Daily Mail in 2017.

“A vindication for investigative journalism...”

Hedge fund manager Crispin Odey has withdrawn his defamation lawsuit against the Financial Times newspaper, almost three years after it accused him of sexually assaulting and harassing more than a dozen women who had worked with him. Odey’s libel suit was filed at the High Court in London in 2024. FT editor Roula Khalaf’s reaction to the collapse of the case is quoted in today’s issue: “This is a vindication for investigative journalism and for the victims whose stories of abuse we reported”.

The FT published its investigation into Odey on 10th June 2023, as the cover story of its FT Weekend Magazine supplement (no. 1,026). The magazine’s stark headline read: “Crispin Odey has got away with assaulting and harassing women for 25 years”. The article, titled “THE GAMBLER” (pp. 18–25), was written by Madison Marriage, Antonia Cundy, and Paul Caruana Galizia.

Gao Zhen

Artist Gao Zhen, who has been detained in China since returning there from the US in 2024, was subject to a one-day trial on 30th March on charges of defaming Chinese national icons. The trial took place in camera at Sanhe, in Heibei province.

Prosecutors cited three satirical sculptures of Mao Zedong created by Gao with his brother Qiang. The Execution of Christ is a 2009 installation of seven Mao statues forming a firing squad to shoot Jesus. Mao’s Guilt is a statue of Mao kneeling in repentance, also from 2009. Miss Mao is a bust of Mao with female breasts and a long Pinocchio-like nose, produced in various versions since 2007.

The law Gao has been accused of breaking came into effect in 2018, long after Gao’s sculptures were made. A Chinese comedy talent agency was fined the equivalent of more than $2 million in 2023 under the same law, after a stand-up comedian made a joke about the Chinese People’s Army.

Stink-O-Vision

Audiences who saw the horror film Dead Lover in cinemas earlier this year were given scratch-and-sniff cards, in a revival of a gimmick first used by John Waters for Polyester in 1981. Waters called the format Odorama, and the producers of Rugrats Go Wild used the same term for their scratch-and-sniff cards in 2003.

In 2011, the fourth film in the Spy Kids franchise was also released with scratch-and-sniff cards, in a format that was renamed Aroma-Scope. In 2023, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was rereleased with scratch-and-sniff cards branded as Stink-O-Vision, and Dead Lover has now borrowed that name for its black scratch-and-sniff cards.

The first experiments with scented cinema occurred sixty years ago, when smells were wafted through cinema air-conditioning vents to accompany the documentary Behind the Great Wall (via the Aroma-Rama process) and piped to cinema seats during the thriller Scent of Mystery (using the rival Smell-O-Vision system). Like Cinerama and 3D, they were Hollywood’s attempts to lure audiences away from television.

Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick’s classic Barry Lyndon will be shown in Bangkok on 3rd May, at GDXperience. The screening is part of Reading Cinéma, a short season organised by Doc Club with the Books and Belongings bookshop.

GDX is a screening room at Stadium One, a new mall dedicated to sports shops and fitness centres. Reading Cinéma runs from 1st to 3rd May. Barry Lyndon was previously shown at Chulalongkorn University in 2023.

There has been a revival of critical interest in Barry Lyndon over the last decade, with three documentaries on the making of the film: the radio programme Castles, Candles, and Kubrick, an episode of the TV programme Hollywood in Éirinn, and Making Barry Lyndon on the Criterion blu-ray. There is also a book on the film, The Making of a Masterpiece, by Alison Castle.

500 Must-See Movies

Total Film magazine first published its 500 Must-See Movies special issue in 2017, listing 500 films classified into five genres: horror, science-fiction, thrillers, action movies, and comedies. A second edition was published in 2022, with a handful of changes.

Since then, ‘new’ editions have appeared each year, without any further changes to the selected films. This year’s sixth edition features only one substitution: in the thriller category, Performance has been removed and replaced by a new entry, Oppenheimer.

Empire and Us Weekly magazines have also published top-500 film lists, as did the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph newspapers. Empire later revised its list for its Australian edition, and published a collection of 500 five-star reviews. Dateline Bangkok also has its own list of 500 classic films.

Total Film’s previous greatest-film lists are: The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time from 2005, The Top 100 Movies of All Time from 2006, and 100 Greatest Movies from 2010. It also compiled a list of The Sixty-Seven Most Influential Films Ever Made in 2009.

Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women

In Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women, Caroline Magennis argues that woman need not feel guilty for not having children. After searching for an appropriate description of herself as a woman without children, she settled on ‘harpy’: “I had tried on different words, and none of them stuck until Harpy.”

Although a harpy is generally depicted as a winged monster, Magennis embraces these physical characteristics as a metaphorical means of escape from criticism: “Through the harpy I want to find a way to turn both the passive-aggressive and direct stigma into something that felt like it had a terrifying power... The harpy came to mean, to me, all the ways in which we had been depicted but also a way out, even if we had to fly away and use our claws to get there.”

Magennis shows how childfree women are demonised by popular culture (specifically, tabloid newspapers and Hollywood films). She cites Lady Macbeth as “the epitome of the ruthless childless monster”, though she also highlights negative cultural archetypes such as wicked stepmothers.

Mary Daly, in Gyn/Ecology (1978), sought to reclaim ‘harpy’, along with similar terms such as ‘witch’, ‘hag’, ‘crone’, and ‘spinster’. Harpy is one of a handful of recent feminist books whose titles refer to misogynistic insults. Other examples include Hags by Victoria Smith, Bitch by Karen Stollznow, Slags on Stage by Katie Beswick, In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet, Bimbo by Ashley James, and several books that tackle the word ‘slut’ (I Am Not a Slut, This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, Wordslut, and Sluts).

Ghosts of Takbai

Ghosts of Takbai (แผลกดทับ), to be directed by Hesome Chemamah, has been announced as one of the projects supported by the new Short Film Fund established by the Thai Film Archive. Video journalist Napasin Samkaewcham’s A Little Bird Finds Its Way Home (นกเล็ก) has also received a Short Film Fund grant, along with thirty-eight other films.

Another film fund was also announced this week. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University, the Documentation of October 6 foundation will finance two new films about the event: We Fight by Pawat Kantawirud and Sirapat Suthonwattanacharoen, and Dialogue on the Massacre by Chanasorn Chaikitiporn.

Hags:The Demonisation of Middle-aged Women

Hags, as its subtitle makes clear, is a study of The Demonisation of Middle-aged Women. Author Victoria Smith explains that her purpose is not to reappropriate the word ‘hag’, nor to self-identify with the characteristics it evokes: “This book is not a celebration of our hag status.” (In contrast, Sharon Blackie — who trademarked the portmanteau word ‘hagitude’ — and fashion designer Batsheva Hay are self-proclaimed hags.)

Smith opposes the concept of linguistic reclamation, arguing that the process is impossible, as some men continue to use the contested terms as pejoratives: “call yourself what you like, but when others call you a witch or a slut, they mean it. We can act as though the words can be fully reclaimed, but they can’t. Those who dislike and fear us are using them too.” Karen Stollznow made a similar observation in her book about about another misogynistic term: “Unfortunately, the ways women try to reclaim bitch do not diminish its stigmatizing power in the hands of others, and especially men.”

Smith’s book shares its theme with The Crone, written by Barbara G. Walker in 1985, and the two books also have similar chapter headings. Mary Daly, in Gyn/Ecology (1978), sought to reclaim ‘hag’, along with related terms such as ‘witch’, ‘harpy’, ‘crone’, and ‘spinster’.

Hags is one of a handful of recent feminist books whose titles refer to misogynistic insults. Other examples include Harpy by Caroline Magennis, Slags on Stage by Katie Beswick, In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet, Bimbo by Ashley James, and several books that tackle the word ‘slut’ (I Am Not a Slut, This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, Wordslut, and Sluts).

Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture

Katie Beswick’s Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture, published last year, “offers a personal and cultural history of the word ‘slag’,” a misogynistic slang term that implies both promiscuity and worthlessness. Beswick discusses the representation of female characters in popular culture (such as the self-defined “total slag” Kat Slater in EastEnders) and female artists (such as Tracey Emin, whose tent installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With exposed her sexual history). The book’s cover illustration is from Kelly Green’s performance art production Slag.

Beswick briefly considers the reappropriation of ‘slag’, arguing that this is not yet possible: “We are not at the stage of reclaiming slag... or even being able to weaponise it effectively as resistance — and yet its complexities must be acknowledged in any reckoning with the term.” She conducted a survey of 169 people’s attitudes towards the word, and only two respondents “expressed a sense of reclamation”. A more common response was that “unlike other offensive sexist words, such as ‘slut’ and ‘cunt’, ‘slag’ was unable to be reclaimed, and therefore felt worse as an insult.”

Slags on Stage is one of a handful of recent feminist books whose titles refer to misogynistic insults. Other examples include Bitch by Karen Stollznow, Harpy by Caroline Magennis, Hags by Victoria Smith, In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet, Bimbo by Ashley James, and several books that tackle the word ‘slut’ (I Am Not a Slut, This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, Wordslut, and Sluts).

Fenian

Fenian, the new album from Irish band Kneecap, will be released on vinyl and CD on 24th April. In an Instagram post on 28th January, the band explained that the album’s title is a reappropriation of a word that has become an anti-Irish pejorative: “Now we’re using it to name everyone speaking truth to power.” The first single from the album, Liar’s Tale, features a blistering criticism of the UK Prime Minister: “fuck Keir Starmer... Better off as compost for farmers”.

A terrorism charge against Kneecap member Mo Chara was dropped last year due to a legal technicality. Paul Goldspring, chief magistrate for England and Wales, dismissed the case on 26th September 2025, noting that his written ruling “is not about the defendant’s innocence or guilt rather only whether this court has jurisdiction to hear the case.” He concluded that the court had no such jurisdiction, as the charge had been filed one day after the six-month statute of limitations had expired: “As such, the proceedings were instituted unlawfully and are null.”

The charge related to a Kneecap concert in London on 21st November 2024, at the O2 Forum Kentish Town during the band’s final show on their Fine Art Tour, when Chara appeared on stage draped in the Hezbollah flag saying: “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!” Hezbollah is classified as a terrorist group under UK law, and the Metropolitan Police charged Chara with displaying the flag “in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a supporter of a proscribed organisation”.

Police also investigated Kneecap’s performance at last year’s Glastonbury Festival, after another band member, Móglaí Bap, called for fans to “start a riot” outside court when Chara’s trial began. After realising that his comments could be construed as an incitement to violence, Bap explained that he wasn’t literally asking people to riot, and Avon and Somerset Police dropped their investigation into the incident.

Cunt Is the Word

Anne Kernan’s Cunt Is the Word project began in 2021, when she designed a new image featuring the word ‘cunt’ every day, “using graphic design, photography, photo manipulation and craft.” In 2024, Kernan published 102 of those images as a photobook.

The book is beautifully packaged: wrapped in tissue paper and accompanied by five postcards. There are 100 copies, each of which is hand-numbered and signed by the artist.

In Defence of Witches: Why Women Are Still on Trial

In her introduction to In Defence of Witches: Why Women Are Still on Trial, Mona Chollet discusses historical and contemporary examples of women self-identifying as witches for feminist rather than occult reasons. These include second-wave feminist publications such as the WITCH Manifesto — which is quoted in the book’s epigraph — and Sorcières (‘witches’) magazine.

Surprisingly, she begins with a relatively unknown figure who has since become famous as a fictional archetype: “The first feminist to disinter the witches’ story and to claim this title for herself was the American Matilda Joslyn Gage, who... inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum.” Given the success of the film adaptation of Baum’s book, The Wizard of Oz, Chollet argues that its director, Victor Fleming, “created the first ‘good witch’ in popular culture.”

Two other recent books have embraced the word ‘witch’ in both the feminist and occult senses: in Witch, Lisa Lister writes: “Witch... is now being reclaimed”, and in Witches, Sluts, Feminists, Kristen J. Sollée credits Gage as “the first known suffragist to reclaim the word ‘witch’.” Mary Daly, in Gyn/Ecology (1978), sought to reclaim ‘witch’, along with related terms such as ‘hag’, ‘harpy’, ‘crone’, and ‘spinster’.

In Defence of Witches was originally published in French as Sorcières: La puissance invaincue des femmes. Its American edition has a slightly longer subtitle (In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial).

In Defence of Witches is one of a handful of recent feminist books whose titles refer to misogynistic insults. Other examples include Bitch by Karen Stollznow, Harpy by Caroline Magennis, Hags by Victoria Smith, Bimbo by Ashley James, and several books that tackle the word ‘slut’ (I Am Not a Slut, This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, Wordslut, and Sluts).

Bimbo:Ditch the Labels. Find Your Voice. Reclaim Your Confidence.

Bimbo, by Ashley James, was published earlier this year. Like Jane Mills in Womanwords thirty years ago, James cites numerous pejorative terms for women (‘bimbo’ of course, but also ‘slut’, and many others), noting how the equivalent male terms are neutral or even positive.

James also discusses the issue of linguistic reclamation: “In recent years, some have begun to reclaim bimbo as a symbol of empowerment — celebrating femininity, self-expresion, and subverting the idea that being hot and clever are mutually exclusive.” But the book — subtitled Ditch the Labels. Find Your Voice. Reclaim Your Confidence. — ultimately argues against reappropriating misogynistic terminology.

James writes that reclaiming pejoratives would be a never-ending battle: “We cannot ever beat these words because if we’re not one, we’re another.” Instead, she advocates autonomy rather than conformity: “I believe in something bigger: the right to live without definition... I want us to break free of the gendered social constraints that aim to keep us compliant.”

Bimbo is one of a handful of recent feminist books whose titles refer to misogynistic insults. Other examples include Harpy by Caroline Magennis, Hags by Victoria Smith, In Defence of Witches by Mona Chollet, Bitch by Karen Stollznow, and several books that tackle the word ‘slut’ (I Am Not a Slut, This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, Wordslut, and Sluts).

Get In

Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire’s Get In, published in hardback last year, told the inside story of how Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney (not necessarily in that order) reformed the Labour Party and won the 2024 UK general election. The paperback edition, released last month, includes a new postscript, The Passive Premiership, covering Starmer’s first year in office. (The postscript’s title is taken from a description of Starmer by an unnamed senior government official: “It’s a very oddly passive premiership.”)

Pogrund and Maguire’s post-election verdict is damning: “After fourteen years of estrangement, the Labour Party had reintroduced itself to the people in the worst possible terms. Starmer had promised a politics of service. His first act had been to stamp recklessly over their fragile trust in the state.” They argue that Starmer is disinterested in policy and disengaged from decision making, and they also criticise the presentational errors his government has made.

Starmer’s unwillingness to engage in policy decisions was most damaging when, shortly after the election, Labour announced a plan to means-test the winter fuel allowance for pensioners: “Starmer did not notice the stench of political death.” The plan was eventually reversed, as was a proposal to break a manifesto commitment not to raise income tax. These U-turns created a double whammy: public anger over the initial proposals, followed by press criticism over the policy reversals.

The book highlights the mixed messaging and negativity of Starmer’s speeches, such as when he replaced New Labour’s optimistic Things Can Only Get Better anthem with a downbeat message: “‘Things will get worse,’ he said, ‘before they get better.’” Then there was the misjudged “island of strangers” speech which, in an Observer interview with Tom Baldwin, Starmer later distanced himself from. And in the absence of a Starmer ideology, there were a series of confusing targets: “five missions that became ‘six measurable milestones,’ then ‘three foundations,’ before being abandoned entirely”.

Pogrund and Maguire cite Starmer’s relationship with Donald Trump as one of his few personal achievements: “Trump, despite himself, grew fond of the prime minister.” This had tangible benefits when the US President reduced tariffs on the UK: “no other world leader had been given the preferential treatment Trump extended to Starmer.” (The relationship is now in doubt, after Trump mocked Starmer as “no Winston Churchill” earlier this month.)

The postscript was written before the latest scandal surrounding Peter Mandelson, whom Starmer appointed as his US ambassador and who is now under police investigation. But Get In does include some fascinating background on the subject: “Not a single strategic decision was taken without the Irishman canvassing Mandelson’s view.” The authors make clear that McSweeney (the Irishman) was Mandelson’s protégée, and that Starmer made the ambassadorial appointment on McSweeney’s say so, without even speaking to Mandelson himself, “either before or after his appointment.”

Their conclusion refers back to a key quote from the book’s hardback edition, a metaphor for Starmer’s apparent position as McSweeney’s unwitting puppet: “back on the Docklands Light Railway — the passive prime minister, content to be driven to his destination by strangers who held him in contempt.” That could also be a description of Boris Johnson’s working relationship with Dominic Cummings, and in both cases the relationships ultimately imploded.

Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2025

Tim Benson, Britain’s leading authority on political cartoons, compiled an anthology of Britain’s Best Ever Political Cartoons in 2021. He also edits an annual cartoon compilation, and the most recent edition, Britain’s Best Political Cartoons 2025, was published in October last year. (It features cartoons from September 2024 to August 2025.)

The best cartoon in the collection is the one on the cover: a Morten Morland cartoon inspired by James Gillray’s famous satirical print The Plumb-pudding in Danger, which depicted Napoleon and William Pitt literally carving up the globe. In Morland’s version, the two statesmen are replaced by the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man: Donald Trump and Elon Musk. (Morland’s cartoon was first published in The Times on 9th January 2025.)

In his introduction, Benson discusses the Benjamin Netanyahu cartoon that resulted in Steve Bell being fired by The Guardian in 2023, comparing it to the similar circumstances of Gerald Scafe’s dismissal from The Sunday Times a decade earlier. (The two veteran cartoonists, both among the best in the business, each faced accusations of antisemitism following their caricatures of Netanyahu.)

6ixtynin9

Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s thriller 6ixtynin9 (เรื่องตลก 69) will be shown at Banban Nannan Library in Nan on 22nd March. In the film, a young woman loses her job and finds ฿1 million in a box outside her door. Like the similar setup in Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave (a personal favourite), this unexpected windfall soon leads to unwanted visitors and bodies piling up.

Pen-ek discussed the film in an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored, explaining how the police department — which dominated the film censorship board when 6ixtynin9 was released — made him add a postscript reassuring viewers that the police were effective at combatting crime: “we were asked by the police to put the rolling credit saying that she was caught and went to jail.” Their justification wasn’t the usual crime-doesn’t-pay moral lesson; instead, it was a face-saving measure by the police: “if the girl could do this, the police look bad.”

6ixtynin9 was previously shown at Bangkok Screening Room in 2017, and on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Waterworks Authority building in 2023. As part of a Pen-ek retrospective in 2018, it was screened on DVD at the Jam Factory and in 35mm at House RCA, and it was also shown at Alliance Française as part of another Pen-ek retrospective that year.

Pen-ek remade 6ixtynin9 as a Netflix series in 2023. In the TV version, the central plotline stuck closely to the film, though there was a new subplot involving a police drugs raid. The film was made, and set, in the aftermath of Thailand’s 1997 economic collapse (known here as the ‘tom yum goong crisis’), and the TV series was filmed shortly after the coronavirus pandemic, which caused similar economic damage. The show also had a political message, and news reports of pro-reform student protests were seen on TV sets throughout the series.

Can’t We Recant?

Sina Wittayawiroj’s exhibition Can’t We Recant? (เราจะถอนคำพูดไม่ได้เลยหรือ?) opens at the MAIELIE gallery in Khon Kaen on 20th March, and runs until 7th June. The exhibition explores Sina’s personal and artistic background, and his connection to the major political events of his lifetime. It was first shown last year at Kinjai Contemporary in Bangkok.

One section, which deals with the 2010 red-shirt crackdown, is titled The Awakening, situating Sina within the “Post-Ratchaprasong art” movement, a label coined by the journal Read (อ่าน; vol. 3, no. 2) describing artists whose work took on a political dimension in response to the crackdown. Sina is one of a generation of artists, writers, and filmmakers who experienced a political awakening in 2010, including Prakit Kobkijwattana, Veeraporn Nitiprapha, Uthis Haemamool, and Chulayarnnon Siriphol. Political awakening is known in Thai as ta sawang, and Chulayarnnon — along with five other directors — discussed his ta sawang experience in an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored.

The Awakening features two installations. One is a life-sized recreation of a famous photograph from 15th May 2010, showing a soldier next to a sign warning that live ammunition was used against the red-shirts. (Red splotches have been added to the soldier’s uniform, as a reminder that the sign was accurate.) The other is a pile of red-shirt memorabilia (such as handclappers and clothing), under a neon pyramid.

Sina’s film Your Ash and My Bone (ธุลีดาว) is also screening throughout the exhibition. Your Ash and My Bone is a documentary collage film in which the artist narrates his life story from birth to the present, from his family background to the progress of his artistic career.

The autobiographical narration is juxtaposed with an account of Thailand’s political turmoil over the same period. There is archive footage of Black May, the 2006 coup (which Sina describes as “this poisonous tree attempting to root itself deepest into society”), the red-shirt crackdown, the whistle-blower protests, the 2014 coup, and the student protest movement of 2020–2021.

Coloured filters are used to add political commentary to some of the events: blue for 2006, red for 2010, and yellow for 2014. Music is also a key element: a montage of scenes showing the arrest of Arnon Nampa and water cannon being used in Siam Square is accompanied by Caravan’s song Jit Phumisak (จิตร ภูมิศักดิ์), linking today’s student protesters to the revolutionary young writer who was killed in 1966.

Your Ash and My Bone also highlights some of Thailand’s artistic controversies over the past two decades: the banning of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ), protests against Anupong Chantorn’s painting Perceptless (ภิกษุสันดานกา), and the censorship of the Rupture (หมายเหตุ ๕/๒๕๕๓) exhibition. The film shows how political repression and artistic censorship are equally corrosive.

Some self-censorship was necessary, and Sina draws attention to this by periodically displaying a spoof computer error screen (“No Freedom”) and obscuring certain words in the English subtitles. Abhichon Rattanabhayon used a similar tactic in his short film The Six Principles (สัญญาของผู้มาก่อนกาล), as did Pen-ek Ratanaruang in Paradoxocracy (ประชาธิป'ไทย).

Sala Saneha

Sala Saneha, a new boutique cinema in Bangkok’s Silom district, opened in December last year and has been holding a series of semi-private events since then. Today is Sala Saneha’s soft launch day, with screenings of Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s popular musical romance Monrak Transistor (มนต์รักทรานซิสเตอร์) and Thunska Pansittivorakul’s new documentary Isan Odyssey (อีสานอำพราง).