Southeast Asia Film & Cinema: News & Articles

November 2013’s issue of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) included a theme program on ‘Emerging Voices from Southeast Asia’, featuring fourteen recent documentaries from the region and several Q&A sessions with some of the directors. In addition, Cambodian documentary fi lm director Rithy Panh was invited to comment on a retrospective of his oeuvre. Coinciding with this program the KITLV, Leiden University, IIAS and IDFA organised the seminar ‘Making History, Everyday Life and Shifting Moralities’, in which some of the filmmakers involved shared thoughts about each other’s methodologies and ongoing concerns with scholars studying Southeast Asian contemporary culture. A supplementary roundtable, on the use of fi lm in research and the classroom, took place on November 27th at the launch of LeidenGlobal. - See more at: http://www.iias.nl/the-newsletter/article/emerging-voices-southeast-asia-seeing-region-its-documentary-films#sthash.qRLanbKj.dpuf

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HAL Film School owner Dhan Plewtianyingtawee, 31, wants Bangkok cinemas to look beyond Hollywood and local blockbusters, and he’s doing something about it. His new venture, HAL Distribution, independently finances the release of small movies from around the world in Thai cinemas, starting with the 2014 Ukrainian silent film Tribe, which is currently screening at Paragon Cineplex and Esplanade Ratchada. Here, he discusses what it takes to bring quality cinema to new audiences.

Working out of Chiang Mai, Thailand, documentary photographer and researcher Philip Jablon has been creating a photographic archive of stand-alone movie theaters across Southeast Asia since 2008 as part of his Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project. Through his evocative images and qualitative research, the Chiang Mai University graduate (who earned an M.A. in Sustainable Development in 2010) wants to cultivate an appreciation of these institutions in the hope of stimulating preservation efforts. Stand-alone movie theaters were not only entertainment venues but also important social centers for the distribution of information and values throughout the 20th century in Southeast Asia. However, their numbers have now rapidly declined in the face of evolving technologies and changing socioeconomic structures and social mores (more recently, for example, movie theaters are built as multiplexes or inside shopping malls). At the current rate of attrition, it is possible that in just a few years such stand-alone theaters may cease to exist in the region.

Directors from the region like Brillante Mendoza and Apichatpong Weerasethakul are growing in prestige on the global stage.

Local conditions limit fruits of rich crop of filmmakers

How To Win At Checkers (Every Time), co-produced by University of Hawaiʻi Academy for Creative Media System Director Chris Lee, has been submitted to the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences by the Thai government for official consideration in the Oscar Best Foreign Film category. The film, set in the suburbs of Bangkok, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in January. It has been well received at more than 50 film festivals around the world and has won seven best film awards.