The Shining

The Shining will be shown today at Baan Who in Bangkok. The venue is an abandoned film studio, a suitably atmospheric location for a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic. The event is organised by Baan Film.

(There are two books about the making of The Shining. Danel Olson edited an anthology about the film in 2015, and J.W. Rinzler and Lee Unkrich collaborated on a lavish two-volume making-of book in 2023.)

Previous screenings of The Shining in Thailand:

• The 1st Lung Film Festival (ลุงฟิล์มเฟสติวัลครั้งที่ 1) in 2026
• Outdoor Cinema at Cloud 11 in 2026
• forty-fifth anniversary rerelease in 2025
• World Class Cinema (ทึ่ง! หนังโลก) at Scala in 2020
• Halloween at Siri House in 2019
• Cinema Winehouse in 2018
• Cinema Scarehouse at Cinema Winehouse in 2015

อ่านบท 6 ตุลา (‘read chapters on 6th Oct.’)

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 6th October 1976 coup, and various commemorations are being held around the country. On 3rd and 4th October, six plays that touch on the events of 1976 — including Wilderness (รักดงดิบ) and วันที่สหายพายุกลับบ้าน (‘the day comrade Payu returned home’) — will be performed at Angoon’s Garden in Bangkok.

วันที่สหายพายุกลับบ้าน will also be performed on 10th October at Weak-end in Phuket, alongside a video of Fundamental. Both events are organised by Thai Collective Scripts.

Wilderness

Thanaphon Accawatanyu’s Wilderness was first staged in 2024. The play is divided into two parts, and in part one, a group of students join the communist insurgency after the Thammasat massacre and escape into the jungle.

Part two — which will not be performed at Angoon’s Garden — features a group of contemporary students. The second part is much more ambiguous than the first, with numerous scenes that appear to be dreams caused by hallucenogenic sweets eaten by the characters.

วันที่สหายพายุกลับบ้าน
(‘the day comrade Payu returned home’)

Ratapong Pinyosophon’s play วันที่สหายพายุกลับบ้าน is the story of Payu, a student who joined the Communist Party of Thailand and fed into the jungle following the violence of 6th October. His father was a soldier who fought against the communist insurgency, putting the two generations into literal conflict with each other. Payu returns home disillusioned, and vows to stay with his mother, though his fellow comrades implore him not to give up the fight.

The play was first staged in 2010 by the Crescent Moon theatre company, and the performance on 10th October will be directed by Nualpanod Khianpukdee. Ratapong has also published the play’s script alongside an account of his writing process.

Fundamental

Teerawat Mulvilai’s dance performance Fundamental was staged by B-Floor Theatre in 2016, to mark the the fortieth anniversary of 6th October. It was specifically inspired by an infamous Neal Ulevich photograph showing a vigilante preparing the hit a massacre victim with a folding chair. The photo shows a large group of bystanders, who did not intervene to stop the desecration of the victim’s body, and Fundamental explores this apathy within society that tolerates mob violence and state crackdowns.

Wildtype 2026

Wildtype, the annual season of short films programmed by Chayanin Tiangpitayagorn, Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa, and Sasawat Boonsri, returns next month for its seventeenth 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, 2024, and 2025.

2026 is no exception, and there will be screenings at Buffalo Bridge Gallery in Bangkok on 3rd and 4th October and at a dozen other locations around Thailand throughout October. More than fifty films will be shown, and the highlights include Long Live the Sin, A Little Bird Finds Its Way Home (นกเล็ก), 8 (๘), and Soundtrack to a Coup d’État 2.

Beam Wong’s music video Long Live the Sin features imagery associated with the three-finger protest movement. It was shown earlier this year at the Goethe-Institut.

In Napasin Samkaewcham’s A Little Bird Finds Its Way Home, a family shares their memories of their grandmother at her funeral. (Napasin’s previous short films include A Love Letter to My Sister.)

Pattanapong Khongsak’s 8 combines historical material with modern technology, using generative AI to visualise the past. Its subtitle, The Silence of the Goats, is a pun on The Silence of the Lambs.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État 2 is the most intriguing film in this year’s programme. Its director is anonymous, and the film is credited to a pseudonym, Johan Liebert. (It’s an unofficial sequel to the 2024 Cold War documentary of the same title.) The film is described — sarcastically — as a documentary paying tribute to Prem Tinsulanonda and the brave military leaders who staged a coup to protect the country and prevent Thaksin Shinawatra’s attempts to exploit the monarchy.

Long Live the Sin, 8, and Soundtrack to a Coup d’État 2 are all part of the Politix programme, screening at Buffalo Bridge on 3rd October. A Little Bird Finds Its Way Home will be shown there on 4th October as part of the Doc programme.

The Politix programme will also be shown on 4th October at PYE Space in Phayao, Fair Boy in Lopburi, and Loftster in Korat; on 10th October at Noir Row Art Space in Udon Thani; on 18th October at Lorem Ipsum in Hat Yai and Us in Phatthalung; and on 23rd October in Ranong and at 23 December in Phitsanulok. The Doc programme will also be shown on 3rd October at PYE, on 4th October at Lorem Ipsum and Fair Boy, on 11th October at Noir Row, on 21st October in Ranong, on 22nd October at 23 December (!), and on 25th October at Us.

(Some of the venue names are potentially confusing. The Ranong screenings will be held at a cafe that has no name, though it has a drawing of a drunken cat as its logo. 23 December is the name of a coffee bar in Phitsanulok, it’s not the date of the screenings.)

Bangkok International Film Festival 2026

The Bangkok International Film Festival 2026 (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์นานาชาติกรุงเทพมหานคร ปี 2569) begins tomorrow. The festival runs until 27th September.

BKKIFF’s Thai Classics programme includes two blockbusters directed by Nonzee Nimibutr: Nang Nak (นางนาก) on 15th September and Dang Bireley’s and Young Gangsters [sic] (2499 อันธพาลครองเมือง) on 26th September. Both screenings will take place at Doc Club and Friends. (The two films were also both shown at last year’s Microwave Film Festival in Sisaket.)

Dateline Bangkok first wrote about BKKIFF back in 2005, and over the next four years — 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 — until the festival’s temporary closure. And the event is still being covered here more than twenty years later.

BKKIFF was originally known as the Bangkok Film Festival when it was launched in 1998 as a commercial event organised by Nation Multimedia. It continued annually for the next four years, until it was renamed the Bangkok International Film Festival in 2003, under the joint sponsorship of Nation Multimedia and the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

That partnership was very short-lived, as Nation Multimedia established a rival event, the World Film Festival of Bangkok, later in 2003. Meanwhile, the Bangkok International Film Festival, organised by TAT alone, continued annually until 2009.

Being run by the tourism department rather than a cultural organisation, the festival often prioritised glitz and glamour over cinematic quality. More shockingly, Juthamas Siriwan, a former TAT governor, was convicted of receiving almost $2 million in bribes linked to the festival, and was jailed for fifty years.

After a long hiatus, the festival was relaunched last year, under completely new management. The relaunch, organised by the Thailand Creative Culture Agency, had a few teething problems, though they seem to have been resolved this year, with an improved website and a confirmed schedule.

Nang Nak has had numerous screenings over the years, including at the Thai Film Archive in 2024, 2021, and 2013. It was also screened at Doc Club and Pub in 2024, at Lido Connect in 2020, at Bangkok Screening Room in 2019, at an outdoor screening in 2018, and at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand in 2010.

Dang Bireley’s and Young Gangsters had two outdoor screenings in 2022: in Chiang Mai (in 35mm) and Bangkok. It was shown at Scala in 2018, and at Ramada Plaza in 2010. It was shown twice at the Film Archive in 2020. Its most recent screening was at Sala Chaloem Thani earlier this year.

Benjamin Netanyahu:“This is an absolute lie…”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has filed a defamation lawsuit against Haaretz (הָאָרֶץ), one of the country’s leading newspapers, after it claimed that he had received and ignored an advance warning about the 7th October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks. Haaretz reported that United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan had informed Netanyahu of an impending Hamas operation in a telephone call at the end of September 2023, and that Netanyahu told none of his security or military officials about the conversation.

The severely damaging allegation appeared in the newspaper’s Hebrew edition on 8th September, and in its English edition today, in a report written by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval adapted from their forthcoming book חטופים — 843 ימים של הפקרה (‘hostages — 843 days of abandonment’). The article included a categorical denial by Netanyahu (“This is an absolute lie”), though it was based on multiple sources and its central allegation has not been refuted by the UAE.

There have been previous claims that Netanyahu ignored intelligence reports about potential unspecified Hamas operations, though the allegation in Haaretz is more damning, as it accuses him of disregarding and concealing a specific warning less than two weeks before the attack took place. Netanyahu is also on trial for corruption, with his next court appearance scheduled for April 2027.

Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick’s classic Barry Lyndon will be shown at Doc Club and Friends in Bangkok on 16th September, 20th September, and 1st October; and at Mecani in Chiang Mai on 20th and 26th September. It was previously shown at Sala Saneha in August, at GDXperience in May, and 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.

Utopia of the Mind

Vichart Somkaew’s new documentary Utopia of the Mind (แดนสวรรค์) was filmed at an abandoned prison in Phatthalung. As Vichart’s camera lingers on the crumbling brickwork and rusting bars, a voiceover by a former inmate recalls the prison’s rules and routines.

We see photographs of political prisoners from different generations. Khrong Chandawong, a pro-democracy politician, was executed on the orders of Sarit Thanarat. The ‘four tigers’ of Isan were MPs killed by the police for their opposition to Plaek Phibunsongkhram. Recent protesters such as Arnon Nampa and Netiporn Sanesangkhom were convicted of lèse-majesté.

What they have in common, aside from their jail sentences, is their commitment to political change. As the film’s title suggests, even when deprived of their freedom, their spirits weren’t broken.

This sense of light in the darkness is reflected by a surreal moment in Vichart’s film: an elderly man who has wrapped a strip of multicoloured lights around himself. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Power Boy photographs have a similar concept, as does a sequence in Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s film Manta Ray (กระเบนราหู).

Utopia of the Mind also reminds me of a quote from Yuthlert Sippapak. When I interviewed him for Thai Cinema Uncensored, he spoke about the contrast between mental and physical freedom: “We are in a jail of imagination. We are like painting in prison. Yes, we can paint, but painting in prison.”

Vichart’s previous short films include Cremation Ceremony (ประวัติย่อของบางสิ่งที่หายไป), 112 News from Heaven, The Letter from Silence (จดหมายจากความเงียบ), Antipsychotics, The Poem of the River, Sleeping Together (ราตรีวิไล), and The Southern Echo. He has also directed the portmanteau film Contemporary Thai Political Trilogy (ไตรภาคการเมืองร่วมสมัยไทย) and the feature-length documentary When My Father Was a Communist (เมื่อพ่อผมเป็นคอมมิวนิสต์).

Images of Fire

Buariyate Eamkamol’s short film Images of Fire (ร่องรอยไฟ) premiered yesterday at the What the Doc! 2 film festival. It will also be shown at Doc Club and Friends on 12th September.

The documentary, which examines the military crackdown on red-shirt protesters in April and May 2010, is both personal and political, forensic and philosophical. It begins self-reflexively, with Buariyate describing his research for the project: “I traveled to different locations in Bangkok. I searched for the spots where protesters were shot and the origin of the bullets.”

Many of the demonstrators were shot by snipers at long range, and Buariyate revisits the locations where several victims died, to determine where the armed soldiers were positioned. He locates the spot on Ratchaprarop Road where Samaphan Srithep was killed on 15th May 2010, and the entrance to Soi Sala Daeng where Chatchai Chalau died two days earlier.

Other recent short films have also returned to locations associated with the red-shirt crackdown: Weerapat Sakolvaree’s Nostalgia includes a sequence filmed at Lumpini Park, and Warat Bureephakdee’s Secret Among Wings (ความลับในฝูงนก) features shots of Ratchaprasong and Wat Pathum Wanaram. The Dutch artist Armando coined the phrase ‘guilty landscapes’ to describe spaces such as these, that bore silent witness to past violence. In both films, as in Images of Fire, the sounds of gunfire are heard on the soundtrack, a reminder of the events that took place at these guilty landscapes.

As a child, Buariyate was taken to the protests by his father. Sixteen years later, as a filmmaker, he became especially interested in the case of Chatchai, who was recording a video when he was killed. Images of Fire considers the parallels between gunsights and camera viewfinders, and the link between proximity and empathy. As Buariyate says in the film: “Distance became a shield.” (Famously, in The Third Man, Harry Lime says that when seen from a distance, other people are just dots: “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”)

A viewfinder is a distancing device, just as a sniper operates at a literal distance from his target, and both guns and cameras can ‘shoot’ people. Thunska Pansittivorakul made that point in an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored, discussing his experience of filming the crackdown on Soi Rangnam in May 2010: “they were shooting guns at the people... But at that time, I needed to keep shooting, I must keep shooting.”

Images of Fire also analyses audio clips of the gunfire, using the soundwaves to determine the types of bullets and their trajectories. One example is from 15th May 2010, when a man was shot in his car and his head slumped on the steering wheel, setting off the car horn. (The same recording is heard on Pisitakun Kuantalaeng’s album Kongkraphan, and Pisitakun also documented the locations at which other victims died for his Ten Year art project.)

With this investigative research — tracking down precise locations and sound clips — Buariyate questions the dominant narratives about 2010 told by the state, the media, and the red-shirts themselves. He includes TV news reports repeating government propaganda about “terrorists in the crowd”, showing how the protesters were demonised. In a voiceover, he notes that armed agitators (so-called ‘men in black’) were present at the demonstrations, despite the protesters’ insistence that they were peaceful. He even encourages skepticism about his own reliability as a narrator, by making a claim about his family that he later admits was false.

Images of Fire is Buariyate’s fourth film that touches on the 2010 violence, after A Fire 9 Kilometers Away, Isekai (อิเซไก), and Red Is the Orangest Colour. (Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the representation of the April–May 2010 events by Thai filmmakers in more detail.)

Sunak at Ten:The Last Conservative Prime Minister?

Anthony Seldon has written political biographies of every British prime minister since John Major. (His books on David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss have also been reviewed here.) His latest, Sunak at Ten, deals with Rishi Sunak’s premiership from 2022 to 2024 and is based on interviews with Sunak and many of his former cabinet ministers.

The Tories suffered their worst ever election defeat under Sunak, though this came after fourteen years of increasingly chaotic Conservative governments, as covered by Ben Riley-Smith in The Right to Rule. If judged purely on the election result, Seldon and his co-author Tom Egerton admit that Sunak “failed miserably”, though they acknowledge that another Conservative victory was almost impossible regardless of who was PM.

Seldon and Egerton cite four criteria by which UK prime ministers should be judged — the national economy, Britain’s international reputation, the strength of the union, and public trust in politics — arguing that Sunak’s leadership improved all except the last. But again, after the disasters of Sunak’s immediate predecessors, public confidence in politics at that point was unrecoverable.

Their final assessment of Sunak is nuanced and ambivalent: “he left his country stronger and more secure than he found it, if still divided and beset by chronic problems.” In Out, which also covered Sunak’s government, Tim Shipman was more critical: “the lack of a driving political vision gave him no political cover from failures of delivery.”

Sunak at Ten’s subtitle is The Last Conservative Prime Minister? This rhetorical device — posing a question to which the answer is almost certainly ‘no’ — is more suited to tabloid headlines than political biographies, and unsurprisingly, in their final sentence, the authors conclude that “we believe it unlikely that Sunak will have been the last Tory prime minister.”

Scene of Oct.จากรอยแผลสู่อนาคต

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the violent and tragic events that took place on 6th October 1976 at Thammasat University, when forty-six people, most of whom were students, were killed by right-wing militia groups and vigilantes. An exhibition organised by Thai PBS, Scene of Oct. จากรอยแผลสู่อนาคต (‘from scars to the future’), will examine the incident from multiple perspectives.

Scene of Oct. will feature poetry, music, and art inspired by 1976, and quotes from films that depict the events at Thammasat. It will even include a board game based on the incident.

The exhibition is part of the VIPA International Film Festival 2026. VIFF runs from 11th to 25th September, and Scene of Oct. is on show from 21st September to 16th October, at the Thai PBS offices in Bangkok.

VIFF’s closing film, on 25th September, is Since That Wednesday... Fifty Years Caught Between Memory and Forgetting (เช้านั้นวันพุธ), a new ninety-minute documentary about 1976 by Kowit Phothisan, the editor of the Isaan Record (เดอะอีสานเรคคอร์ด) news website. (Since That Wednesday...’s original English title was The Unforgetting Wednesday. An hour-long version of the film will be broadcast on Thai PBS on 5th October.)

The film’s poster image has been revised, after complaints that the original version used AI to insert elements that were not present at the scene. The original poster showed a black-and-white image of a student’s body being dragged away, with a red folding chair nearby, in reference to an infamous Neal Ulevich photograph from 6th October.

In reality, the folding chair was not at the location in the photograph, and it transpired that generative AI had been used to create it. Kowit posted an apology online, and created a new poster with minimal use of AI to show an aerial view of an existing photo. While the new poster uses AI to change the vantage point of the viewer, it doesn’t add any inaccurate elements to the image.

Pattanapong Khongsak’s short film 8 (๘) also uses AI to augment historical photographs. Chatchawan Thongchan’s short film From Forest to City (อรัญนคร) also features a red folding chair in an otherwise black-and-white scene. Bhandevanov Devakula’s film Whatever, I Don’t Care (ช่างมันฉันไม่แคร์) also represents the events of 6th October via gunshots heard on its soundtrack.

On the same day, the festival will screen the short student drama The Echo Remembered of Souls [sic] (เสียงสะท้อนจากความทรงจำ), directed by Sassawat Kanayat. The film features a group of students planning an exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of 6th October, though they disagree on how confrontational it should be. After a rather earnest discussion, they finally compromise and plan a display that acknowledges the victims but doesn’t show the violence of the event. The Echo Remembered of Souls was first shown at Mahidol University’s Prince Mahidol Hall in Salaya on 17th August, as part of Peace Festival Week 2026 (เทศกาลสันติภาพ 2569). It will also be screened at Thammasat’s Sri Burapha Auditorium on 5th October.

Of course, the scripted deabte among the exhibition organisers is similar to the dilemma faced by the real-life organisers of 6th October exhibitions. For the first such event, at Thammasat in 1996, for example, plans to include the Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper that sparked the raid on the campus were dropped, as the front page was considered too incendiary. In contrast, an exhibition at Mahasarakham University’s College of Politics and Governance on the fiftieth anniversary of 6th October will include a photocopy of every page from that issue of Dao Siam.

Another short film by Kassawat, The Empty Page (บันทึกหน้าสุดท้าย), will be shown on 24th September. This film also features a group of students planning an exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of 6th October, though in a flashback scene they also play Thammasat students hiding from gunfire on the day of the attack. They tend to one injured student, though no blood is visible. Shots are heard on the soundtrack, though the attackers are not shown. The Empty Page will also be shown at the Sri Burapha Auditorium on 4th October.

The festival will also screen Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope on 12th September. (Rope was previously shown at the Pridi Banomyong Institute in 2015, and at Bangkok Screening Room in 2018.)