Bangkok Experimental Film Festival!
Chiang Mai movies update, Saturday, July 12
by Thomas Ohlson
Experimental Film Festival in Full Swing
Beginning Sunday, July 13, at the CMU Art Museum is a program of experimental films, independent short films, and experimental documentaries presented by the company of the acclaimed Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in association with the Thai Film Foundation and the independent arts organization Project 304.
This is the touring version of the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival 5, which ran in Bangkok in March of this year, the fifth year of the festival.
The festival begins Sunday (tomorrow, July 13) and runs through July 27. Sunday’s program will run from 1 pm to 4:30 pm in the auditorium of the Chiang Mai University Art Museum on Nimmanahaeminda Road.
The subsequent programs will be shown at 7 pm at Film Space, which is to the right and in the back of the CMU Art Museum, in the Media Arts and Design building, across from the ballet school, on the 2nd floor. Or perhaps the roof.
Admission is free to all screenings.
Sunday’s presentation will consist of two programs:
1:00 – 2:30 pm – Nature’s Recipe – an 80-minute ethnographic program giving a taste of the diverse food traditions of Southeast Asia. More than just a celebration of nature’s cycles, these films show how food can also inspire the maintenance and revival of ancient knowledge.
2:30 – 4:30 pm – If These Walls Could Talk … 100 minutes. Six films about the secret lives of walls. At the arbitrary borders between states and communities, friend and foe blur, chance and history intersect and collide, and what is kept apart may end up getting bound together.
The next scheduled showings are Friday through Sunday, July 18-20, at 7 pm. Friday’s program, July 18: Test Patterns – a 65-minute program of focusing on the mass media, from YouTube to Big Brother, as media artists riff on and remix the familiar of everyday life.
Saturday’s program, July 19: Track Changes – another 65-minute program, this one reflecting on the role of the media in the making – and the forgetting – of political history. Ten films responding to Thailand’s political flux since 2006, including three films made on the night of the September 19 coup d’état.
Sunday, July 20: Daily Rounds – an 85-minute collection of new Thai works devoted to the cycles of everyday life. Experimental films that reveal what is extraordinary about the ordinary, what is timeless about the everyday.
