Bangsaen Film Festival 2025

The Bangsaen Film Festival 2025 (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์บางแสน 2025) will take place at Burapha University’s Music and Performing Arts Centre on 16th and 17th October. The opening film is Nottapon Boonprakob’s documentary Come and See (เอหิปัสสิโก), which examines the practices of the Wat Phra Dhammakaya temple complex (in Pathum Thani province, near Bangkok) and its former abbot, Dhammajayo, who has long been suspected of money laundering.

Dhammakaya is a Buddhist sect recognised by the Sangha Supreme Council, though it closely resembles a cult. Dhammakaya supporters are encouraged to make large financial donations in return for promises of salvation, and thousands of followers have given their savings to the temple. (Come and See interviews both current devotees and disaffected former members.) After Dhammajayo was accused of corruption, a declaration of his innocence was added to the temple’s morning prayers. (The film shows temple visitors reciting this like a mantra.)

The Dhammakaya complex itself is only twenty years old, and its design is inherently cinematic. The enormous Cetiya temple resembles a golden UFO, and temple ceremonies are conducted on an epic scale, with tens of thousands of monks and worshippers arranged with geometric precision. The temple cooperated with Nottapon, though his access was limited; Come and See doesn’t investigate the allegations against Dhammajayo, though it does provide extensive coverage of the 2016 DSI raid on the temple and Dhammajayo’s subsequent disappearance.

Come and See is also a footnote in the history of Thai film censorship, as its original release was briefly in doubt. After Nottapon submitted the film to the censors, they telephoned him and explained that some board members had reservations about it. Would he mind if they rejected the film, they asked. Naturally, he did mind, so they invited him to a meeting on 10th March 2021.

Before the meeting took place, the Thai Film Director Association publicised the case online, and the stage was set for another film censorship controversy. However, when Nottapon met the censors as arranged, they told him that there was no problem, and the film was passed uncut with a universal ‘G’ rating.

“The proceedings were instituted unlawfully...”

A terrorism charge against Kneecap member Mo Chara has been dropped due to a legal technicality. Paul Goldspring, chief magistrate for England and Wales, dismissed the case on 26th September, 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 last year, 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 this 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.

Bangkok International Film Festival 2025

After a long hiatus, the Bangkok International Film Festival returns this year. The organisers — THACCA, the Thailand Creative Culture Agency — are keen to stress that the event is under completely new management, after the corruption scandal associated with the festival in its previous incarnation. (The festival was originally a glitzy event sponsored by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, and the head of the TAT received almost $2 million in bribes. She was given a fifty-year jail sentence in 2017.)

This year’s all-new BKKIFF will feature an impressive selection of more than 200 films, though there have been some teething problems. The festival will open tomorrow, though its Facebook page is currently counting down the days to 29th September. Also, at the time of writing — the day before the festival opens — the venues and screening dates for each film have not yet been announced, and the festival’s website hasn’t been updated since last month.

One of the highlights of the event will be a retrospective of films by Chatrichalerm Yukol, including his groundbreaking social realist drama His Name Is Karn (เขาชื่อกานต์). But again the details have not yet been confirmed: the festival’s website claims that eighteen of his films will be shown, though it lists only thirteen of them, and the event’s Facebook page lists only five of his films. (His Name Is Karn will be shown at Paragon Cineplex on 8th October, and at Major Cineplex’s Sukhumvit branch on 11th October.)

Another director, Wim Wenders, is also the subject of a BKKIFF retrospective, at Lido Connect. The programme includes his classic road movie Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit), screening on 12th October. But this is the third Wenders retrospective in Thailand since 2016, and it’s been only a year since the previous one.

There will also be chances to catch two recent Thai films: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ) and Chookiat Sakveerakul’s Taklee Genesis (ตาคลี เจเนซิส). A Useful Ghost is showing at Major Cineplex’s Sukhumvit branch on 12th October, and Taklee Genesis is at the same venue on 7th and 8th October.

BKKIFF screenings will take place at six cinemas in Bangkok, and the festival runs until 15th October.

Chiang Mai International Fantastic Film Festival 2025

The Chiang Mai International Fantastic Film Festival 2025 opens today and runs until 27th September, with screenings taking place at the Chiang Mai branch of Major Cineplex. CIFAN is using ‘fantastic’ as an umbrella term for a diverse range of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror films with surreal or magical realist elements.

One of the highlights is Chookiat Sakveerakul’s Taklee Genesis (ตาคลี เจเนซิส), which features time travel, dinosaurs, kaiju monsters, zombies, cavemen, the Cold War, a dystopian future, and the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University, all woven together into an ambitious sci-fi epic. It will be shown in IMAX DMR format on 24th September, followed by a Q&A with Chookiat.

The festival’s short film programme includes Hydrocracy by Natthapon Sangkam (on 20th and 23rd September), a dystopian drama in which a young man escapes from state-appointed snipers. The protagonist discovers that the population is being controlled via drinking water containing chemicals that react to sound waves transmitted by the government. The film’s title is one of several puns on the word ‘democracy’ by Thai artists and writers.

Taklee Genesis

The prologue to Taklee Genesis takes place in May 1992 (an unspoken reference to ‘Black May’), when a young girl witnesses “dead bodies falling from the sky.” These are students who died during the Thammasat tragedy, their bodies teleported by the Taklee Genesis device, a time machine that can create alternate realities. As one character says: “Taklee Genesis was used to cover up a massacre.”

When the girl, Stella, grows up, she learns that her father was a CIA agent involved in the development of the Taklee Genesis. One of the project’s test subjects, Lawan, was transformed into a forest-dwelling spirit, like the monkey ghost in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ), another supernatural personification of the legacy of the Cold War.

Stella and her friend Kong use the Taklee Genesis to travel back in time to Thammasat on 6th October 1976, after Kong discovers that he is one of the massacre victims who fell from the sky. Chookiat recreates the violence of that day, showing Red Gaur militiamen gunning down students. A young boy stands alone on a balcony laughing at the carnage, in a reference to a smiling onlooker in a photograph by Neal Ulevich. (The artist Khai Maew created a model of the child, which he called Happy Boy.)

Thanks to the Taklee Genesis, Kong has the chance to fight back against the vigilantes who have stormed the campus. This fantasy scenario, in which a Thammasat victim is given the agency to tackle his potential killers, is similar to the alternate history narrative in Preecha Raksorn’s comic strip Once Upon a Time at..., in which the victim in Ulevich’s photograph escapes from his assailant.

Discussion of the Thammasat massacre was suppressed for years, not by the fictional Taklee Genesis device, but instead by successive military governments. Today, it’s primarily through photographs of the event, particularly the famous image by Ulevich, that the incident is remembered. In one of the film’s most powerful moments, Kong takes a roll of film from the camera of his Thammasat classmate and gives it to Stella, telling her: “Make sure we’re not forgotten.”

Taklee Genesis was screened in Bangkok last week, and at the Thai Film Archive earlier this year. It’s one of more than fifty films that reference the 1976 massacre, and many of those films are discussed in Thai Cinema Uncensored.

Microwave Film Festival

Next week, the Microwave Film Festival will show a selection of nine key films from the Thai New Wave movement, a fantastic opportunity to see some of the country’s most popular and influential films from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Highlights include Nonzee Nimibutr’s Dang Bireley’s and Young Gangsters [sic] (2499 อันธพาลครองเมือง) and Nang Nak (นางนาก) on 27th September, Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Fun Bar Karaoke (ฝันบ้าคาราโอเกะ) on 25th September, and Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger (ฟ้าทะลายโจร) on 26th September. The festival runs from 24th to 28th September. Screenings will take place at the Suen Heng Plaza cinema in Sisaket.

Lucky Loser:How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success

US President Donald Trump has filed a defamation lawsuit against the publisher and authors of Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. The book, by New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, was published last year. Buettner and Craig won the Pulitzer Prize for their investigations into Trump’s finances, and the book is an expanded account of their findings.

Trump’s lawsuit, filed on 15th September at the US District Court in Florida, describes Lucky Loser as “filled with repugnant distortions and fabrications about President Trump”. He is seeking an extraordinary $15 billion in damages, though the case will almost certainly be dismissed, as the book is a work of meticulous investigative journalism. (The lawsuit specifies multiple passages that contain allegedly defamatory statements, on pp. 5–8, 69, 148, 159, 166, 184, 219, 270, 290, 300–301, 313, 352–354, 360, 366, 398, 444–445, and 448–449.)

(The lawsuit also cites three New York Times articles — one of which is an extract from the book — as defamatory. The articles were published online and in print, in the weeks leading up to last year’s US election, though the lawsuit refers only to the online versions.)

Today, a judge dismissed the lawsuit, though he gave Trump’s legal team four weeks to submit a revised version. In a brief written order, judge Steven D. Merryday described the lawsuit as “decidedly improper and impermissible.” He argued that its focus on recounting Trump’s electoral success and business career was immaterial to the legal case, noting that it contained “abundant, florid, and enervating detail.” He stipulated that any resubmitted version must be under forty pages long, as opposed to the rambling eighty-five-page original suit.

This is only the second time that Trump has personally taken legal action against a publisher during his presidency. The first occasion was earlier this year, when he sued The Wall Street Journal, claiming that a letter he wrote to Jeffrey Epstein didn’t exist. Since the WSJ lawsuit was filed, the letter has been published, and Trump continues to deny that he wrote it, even though it’s clearly signed by him.

Trump has sued numerous other media figures and news organisations over the years, 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 last year. CBS also agreed to an out-of-court settlement earlier this year after he sued them in 2024.

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.

Lucky Loser is the twenty-second Trump tome on the Dateline Bangkok bookshelf. The others are: TrumpNation, War, The Divider, Betrayal, Confidence Man, Fire and Fury, Too Much and Never Enough, Fear, Rage, Peril, I Alone Can Fix It, A Very Stable Genius, Inside Trump’s White House, The United States of Trump, Trump’s Enemies, The Trump White House, The Room Where It Happened, Team of Five, American Carnage, The Cost, and the audiobook The Trump Tapes.

ความฝันของชายผู้กลายเป็นดาวฤกษ์ (‘the dream of a man who became a star’)

Today is the nineteenth anniversary of the 2006 coup, and Napat Treepalawisetkun’s new fantasy novel ความฝันของชายผู้กลายเป็นดาวฤกษ์ (‘the dream of a man who became a star’) explores the impact of that event on Thai society. In the book, ‘impact’ is taken literally, as a giant meteorite strikes the country in September 2006. The celestial object is a metaphor for the disruptive effects of the coup, though the book is also one of several recent novels that refer to the 1976 massacre at Thammast University.

The book will be released next month, a day before the anniversary of the Thammasat incident. Napat previously directed the film We Will Forget It Again (แล้วเราจะลืมมันอีกครั้ง), which addressed another tragic political milestone: the killing of protesters at Ratchaprasong in 2010. In Napat’s short drama, a victim of the crackdown returns as a ghost, a trickle of blood running down her face, to be reunited with her surviving daughters.

Wildtype 2025

Wildtype, the annual season of short films programmed by Chayanin Tiangpitayagorn, Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa, and Sasawat Boonsri, returns this month for its sixteenth year. After being held largely online in 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, the event has been expanding during the past few years, with screenings around the country in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

This year is no exception, and there will be screenings at Buffalo Bridge Gallery in Bangkok, Bangkok University’s School of Digital Media and Cinematic Arts, A.E.Y. Space in Songkhla, Chiang Mai University’s Department of Media Arts and Design, Don’t Be Selfish in Phayao, Us coffee shop in Phatthalung, Lorem Ipsum in Hat Yai, Noir Row Art Space in Udon Thani, Berng Nang Club in Khon Kaen, and Vongchavalitkul University’s Faculty of Communication Arts in Korat. Wildtype 2025 begins on 20th September.

One of this year’s highlights is The Returning (วนเวียน), a short film by Supong Jitmuang documenting the growing attendance at events commemorating the 6th October 1976 Thammasat University massacre since 2020. (Supong also directed the documentary Mob 2020–2021.)

The short film Oblivion (เลือน), a collage of found footage woven into a magical realist allegory, is also included. Directed under the pseudonym Burindh the Golden Goby, it’s another of the fifty or more films that refer to the 1976 massacre.

Buariyate Eamkamol’s short film A Fire 9 Kilometers Away is another highlight. The film is a blend of documentary and fiction, and features a poem dedicated to Samaphan Srithep, one of the youngest victims of the crackdown on protesters in Bangkok in 2010. Projected as a diptych, the film makes ironic juxtapositions, showing military snipers on 10th April 2010 alongside footage of revellers firing water pistols during the April Songkran festival.

The Returning, Oblivion, and A Fire 9 Kilometers Away will all be shown as part of a programme titled The Party and the Guest. They will be screened at Buffalo Bridge and Don’t Be Selfish on 21st September, at CMU on 23rd September, at Vongchavalitkul on 1st October, at Berng Nang on 5th October, and at BUDC on 29th October.

The Ordinary

Prapassorn Konmuang’s The Ordinary (คนธรรมดา) will be restaged on 19th September at Thammasat University. The play, a monologue about resistance to coups and authoritarianism, is directed by Thunratram Cheepnurat. The performance will take place at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, with advance tickets priced at ฿112. (Regular tickets cost ฿247.50, and 2475 is the Buddhist Era equivalent of 1932, the year that absolute monarchy was abolished.)

19th September

19th September is a significant date, being the fifth anniversary of a protest at Thammasat in 2020, one of the largest student-led demonstrations since the 2014 coup. The play’s revival is one of a series of events organised by the United Front of Thammasat and Demonstration, and the Democracy Restoration Group, collectively titled ทบทวน 5 ปี 19 กันยา 2563 (‘looking back 5 years since 19th September 2020’).

The date also marks another anniversary, as the coup against Thaksin Shinawatra took place on 19th September 2006. That date appears in the titles of two books published by Same Sky: รัฐประหาร 19 กันยา (‘19th Sept. coup’) and 19–19.

112

The ticket price for The Ordinary is also symbolic: ฿112 refers to the lèse-majesté law, which is article 112 of the Thai criminal code. Similarly, the catalogue for Wittawat Tongkeaw’s exhibition Re/Place cost ฿112, and two poetry books — เหมือนบอดใบ้ไพร่ฟ้ามาสุดทาง (‘we subjects, as if mute and blind, have found ourselves at the end of the line’) and ราษฎรที่รักทั้งหลาย (‘dear citizens’) — were also sold at that price.

There have been other subtle cultural references to 112 in recent years. Another play, Wilderness (รักดงดิบ), included a recipe stating that food should “dry in the sun for 112 hours”. Elevenfinger’s single Land of Compromise was released at 1:12pm. Vichart Somkaew’s documentary 112 News from Heaven features 112 headlines from a 112-day period, and 112 photographic portraits. The Evidences of Resistance [sic] (วัตถุพยานแห่งการต่อต้าน) exhibition was held in room 112 at Thammasat’s Museum of Anthropology.

Jaws

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the original summer blockbuster, was released fifty years ago, in 1975. To mark its fiftieth anniversary, a new documentary — Jaws @ 50 — was released on blu-ray, and the film is being rereleased in cinemas worldwide. Jaws will open in Thailand on 25th September.

Jaws was shown five years ago at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya, as part of the World Class Cinema (ทึ่ง! หนังโลก) season. A planned screening at Scala in Bangkok was cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

There are two other classics also being rereleased this month, both on IMAX screens: Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫) opens today in IMAX DMR format (and at regular cinemas), and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight opens on 18th September.

When The Dark Knight was shown at the Paragon Cineplex IMAX on its original release in 2008, it was projected in 70mm. Sadly, the 70mm projector was removed in 2020 after repeatedly breaking down. In fact, from today, the Paragon IMAX cinema is temporarily closed for renovation, meaning that Thailand has no full-size IMAX screen currently in operation.