09 January 2005

Tak Bai


Same Sky Same Sky

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra announced last month that anyone selling VCDs containing footage of the Tak Bai incident would be prosecuted. On 25th October last year, more than 1,000 Muslim protesters were rounded up by the army and taken to a military camp. The men were forced to lie on top of each other for five hours while they were being transported, resulting in seventy-eight protesters dying of suffocation. Footage of the incident was not broadcast by state television, though it has been circulating on VCD. Same Sky (ฟ้าเดียวกัน) magazine distributed a Tak Bai VCD—ความจริงที่ตากใบ (‘the truth at Tak Bai’)—with its October–December 2004 issue (vol. 2, no. 4), in defiance of the ban.

07 January 2005

2005 Bangkok International Film Festival


2005 Bangkok International Film Festival

The 2005 Bangkok International Film Festival runs from 13th to 24th January, though a screening of The Sound of Music tomorrow is also part of the festival lineup. The classic musical will have an outdoor, sing-along screening at Benchasiri Park. Catherine Breillat’s sexually explicit drama Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer) will be shown on 14th January, at the SFX Emporium cinema.