The 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival
Various venues, Bangkok, Thailand
Breda Lynch, The End
The 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (BEFF) opened amidst controversy, with Thailand’s Censorship Board demanding cuts to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s acclaimed Sang Satawat (Syndromes and a Century, 2006). The board claimed that it lacked artistic merit and showed Thai society in a bad light, but, ironically, there was a number of films in the BEFF that were possibly more deserving of these accusations than Weerasethakul’s gentle movie. One wonders what the powers-that-be thought of Wathit Wattanasakonpan’s In the Night of Revolution, in which Thai teenagers smoke pot, get drunk and act silly against the backdrop of last year’s military coup. Or Michael Shaowanasai’s transvestite parody of Thai royalty, or Pramote Saengsorn’s film about a voyeuristic monk in a Bangkok cruising area.
The irony is less that all of these films were still shown while Weerasethakul was forced to cut nearly 15 minutes of scenes that included shots of doctors drinking alcohol in a Thai hospital. It was as though the BEFF was allowed to expose the stupidity of the board’s accusations. Lack of artistic merit and purportedly negative images of Thailand were everywhere and nowhere in the festival. Therein lies the rub, so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning: how can decisions be made in these terms and as a condition for censorship?
The extent to which Thai filmmakers can be understood as representing Thailand today is, of course, at issue, and the BEFF’s continued importance stems from this. In general terms, the diversity of images that come with such an enormous programme (the films shown seemed innumerable) necessarily subverts any attempt to establish the significance of particular viewpoints. In specific terms, where Thailand was explicitly addressed, the film-makers tended towards deconstruction and commentary rather than statements. This included everything from Prateep Suthathongthai’s straightforwardly critical Explanation of the Word ‘Thai’ to Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s deeply humorous Bangkok Tanks, in which chat-line text – ‘What’s happening?’; ‘We get a day off work?’ – is superimposed onto a recent CNN interview with expelled PM Thaksin Shinawatra.
The international contributions to BEFF served to emphasize the idiosyncrasies of contemporary film-making in Thailand. Inge Campbell Blackman’s Legacy recounted aspects of black history via her relationship with her mother in a conventionally ‘experimental’ and po-faced manner. Tan Pin Pin’s awful Singapore Gaga represented its subjects – those who ostensibly transgress Singapore’s sense of streamlined perfection – both artlessly and voyeuristically. Breda Lynch’s The End, on the other hand, was a masterful sound and image installation that called on the viewer to consider what it means to declare definitive conclusions. Needless to say, perhaps this response fitted the mood of the festival best.
Brian Curtin
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