The riches of Southeast Asian stories and images are celebrated at the 4th Bangkok Asean Film Festival, which opens tonight at SF CentralWorld and runs until Sunday. Hosted by the Thai Ministry of Culture, this year's edition marks the 51st anniversary of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the regional body whose primary mission is economics and which increasingly pays more heed to cultural promotion.
Ten contemporary films from Southeast Asia are on the programme -- no Brunei, Laos or Vietnam this time -- plus three classic films in the sidebar. The festival opens tonight with Eullenia, a thriller by Paul Spurrier, a Bangkok-based English filmmaker who has lived and worked here for over a decade.
"The festival shows the diversity of the region, not just in the variety of stories being told, but also in the way films are being made," said Pimpaka Towira, programme consultant to the Ministry of Culture. "In Eullenia, we have a film directed by an Englishman in Bangkok, we have a Myanmar-Japan co-production, and we also have an Indonesian film partly funded by Holland, Australia and Qatar. All of this reflects that the industry [here] has become increasingly international."
It is known that while other Southeast Asian countries are familiar with new Thai films, the opposite isn't the case. While popular Thai titles -- for instance, Bad Genius from last year or several other horror films of the past 10 years -- were released in multiplexes across the region from Laos to Singapore and Indonesia, Thai audiences hardly ever have a chance to watch films from our neighbouring Malaysia, Myanmar or Cambodia, and even rarer have we had experience with Indonesian or Filipino titles. "The festival is a chance for viewers in Thailand to realise that there are so many stories from the region being told on film," said Pimpaka.
The 13 films in the programme are a broad sketch of the region in its joy and trouble, with stories of immigrants, family drama and working-class struggles, as well as a horror tale and a child's reminiscence. Several films also deal with history in their respective countries -- a peasant uprising in the Philippines in 1931, the dark legacy of the Khmer Rouge, a troubled territory in Indonesia, a drama set at the end of the Ferdinand Marcos era.
In The Life Of Music is a Cambodian drama that uses the song Champa Of Battambang, a classic tune by Sinn Sisamuth, to connect the lives of people living before and after the Khmer Rouge regime. Night Bus is a thriller from Indonesia about a group of villagers on a night bus to Sampah, a remote town where the military is fighting a separatist movement. Passage Of Life is a Myanmar-Japan co-production, about a Myanmar family that lives in Japan and longs to return home. Shuttle Life is an acclaimed family drama about a poor teenage boy and his fight against the soulless bureaucracy to retrieve the body of his deceased sister. The Seen And Unseen is a tale of magical realism from Indonesia, in which a girl slips through a dream to meet her comatose twin. From Singapore is Their Remaining Journey, in which the spirit of a dead actor is trapped with a stranger's family as she waits for reincarnation. The Thai film The Wall is about a filmmaker and his struggle to tell a story.
There are also two Filipino films, The Ashes And Ghosts Of Tayug 1931 and Nervous Translation, as well as Eullenia (see interviews with directors in sidebar).
The festival is free. Audiences are advised to register at Facebook: BangkokAseanFilmFestival. Tickets can be picked up 30min before each showtime at SF World, CentralWorld.
For more information, call 02-643-9100 or visit www.facebook.com/BangkokAseanFilmFestival.
Christopher Gozum on The Ashes And Ghosts Of Tayug 1931
The Ashes And Ghosts Of Tayug 1931 is a Filipino film based on the incident in 1931 in the northern Philippines, when a peasant uprising was led by a charismatic, Christ-like figure called Pedro Calosa. The director, Christopher Gozum, comes from the province of Pangasinan, where the story takes place, and his treatment of history is intriguing, through a mix of documentary-style realism and allegorical folk tale.
Gozum talks to us about the film. The Ashes And Ghosts Of Tayug 1931 will be screened on Friday at 8.30pm and Sunday at 1.10pm at SF CentralWorld.
The story of Pedro Calosa is intriguing. Why did you choose to tell his story?
Pedro Calosa is one of the important historical figures, a peasant folk hero in the Pangasinan province where I came from. The Pangasinan province is found in the northern Philippines, and agriculture continues to be the primary source of livelihood for people from this region. It is my aim as a regional filmmaker to present relatively unknown stories from the regions or provinces of the Philippines to the mainstream consciousness through independent films.
Is this episode in 1931 well-known in the Philippines? How do most people regard it in terms of historical importance?
Several historians, both Filipino and foreign, wrote on the subject. The subject has been written about in a college history book here in the Philippines. Several historians thought the subject was very important because Calosa and the Tayug Uprising of 1931 has been a part of the Filipino revolutionary tradition dating back to the early years of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines in the 16th century. Also, the root of the Uprising of 1931 is agrarian reform, a major social issue that has not been fully resolved by the Philippine government up until the present times.
Many Filipinos today have become indifferent to our very own history. Filipinos tend to have short memories. People in my province of Pangasinan and especially in Calosa's very own hometown of Tayug no longer have any memory at all about this important peasant folk hero and the uprising.
How's the independent film scene in the Philippines doing? Is it hard, for example, to raise money for a film like this?
Yes, it is extremely hard to get funding for Filipino regional films. These are the regional films presented in languages apart from Tagalog or Filipino, the mainstream or national language of the country. It is also difficult to fund projects with an unpopular or unknown historical subject. This project was the recipient of a competitive film grant offered annually to Filipino filmmakers. Despite all these difficulties, the regional cinema movement in the Philippines is getting stronger and attracting more mainstream audiences and funders.
Paul Spurrier on Eullenia
Eullenia is directed by Paul Spurrier, an English filmmaker who has lived in Bangkok for over a decade, and who also runs the Friese Greene Club for cinema lovers. This is Spurrier's third film made in Thailand. The first two are P and The Forest, both featuring supernatural elements. Eullenia, however, is a thriller about a billionaire with dark secrets and self-destructive desires.
Spurrier talks to us about the film, which screens tonight as the opening film of the Bangkok Asean Film Festival.
What exactly is Eullenia about?
It's a story of three Thai girls who have big problems, and they meet a very rich man who's willing to give them all the money they need to solve their problems. But are they prepared to give him what he wants in return? Of course, we hope it works on the level of just being an entertaining, suspenseful and sometimes scary story. But I also intended it to be an allegory for some of the worrying problems in society today: unbridled power, the wealth divide, and racial economic and sexual exploitation.
Mystery and the supernatural seem to be your interest. Is it also the case here?
This is the first that doesn't include supernatural elements. I think with my last film, The Forest, perhaps I said all I needed to for the moment about ghosts. I came to the conclusion that there are very few ghosts, however gruesome and scary, who are even a fraction as scary as some of the real things that happen in life. Desperation, poverty, sickness, loneliness are really scary.
This is the third film you've made in Thailand. How has the filmmaking experience been over the years?
I love making films in Thailand. I love the atmosphere on a Thai film set since it's like being part of a temporary family. Everyone is supportive and pulls together. Our main Thai actor (P'Pu Vithaya "Pu" Pansringarm), apart from being a great actor, is also a great cook.
Besides, I'm thrilled and delighted to screen Eullenia at the Bangkok Asean Film Festival. I created a bit of a stir when I said [at a festival in India] that we were engaged in a cultural war with America. But I do believe that Western culture is bulldozing through the world. How can a film from Asean ever compete with the budgets, effects and marketing of the Hollywood blockbusters? We must find better ways to support and promote local films.
Shireen Sono on Nervous Translation
Nervous Translation is another Filipino film in the Bangkok Asean Film Festival. Set in 1986, Ferdinand Marcos' last year in the presidential office, the film is a lovely observation of an eight-year-old girl's life in a house where she lives with her mother, who works in a shoe factory, while her father is present only as a voice from a tape cassette sent from Saudi Arabia, where he has gone to work.
The director is Shireen Sono, an upcoming Filipino filmmaker who grew up in Japan. She talks to us about Nervous Translation, showing tomorrow at 6.30pm and on Saturday at 6pm.
Why did you set the film in that year, at the end of the Marcos era?
I grew up outside the country, rather sheltered in Japan, and was quite oblivious to the turmoil of the 80s in the Philippines. It wasn't until I was in college and discovered cinema that I became aware of my own limits and possibilities and felt I had found a medium to make sense of the things I do not understand.
The film is set in the late 1980s, depicting the beginnings of the highly globalised, consumerist world we live in today. Nervous Translation seeks to recapture an important period in Philippine history and draw connections to the present day through issues that are still very familiar to us: the complexity of the family unit in light of migration, an obsession with consumer electronics and personal technology, and the sheer power of nature to remind us of our limits and about what really matters.
In the film, the father of the girl is working in Saudi Arabia. This is the same as a lot of families in Thailand in the 1980s. Is there any particular reason you set up the story like that?
If you ask anyone around my age about it, chances are they have a parent or close relative who worked in Saudi in the 80s. It's that common. OFWs, short for overseas Filipino workers, are still the driving force of the Philippine economy, and there is a whole generation of kids growing up without their mothers and fathers.
My parents both worked in Japan, and I was privileged to grow up together with them, but the trade-off was being alien to our country. It didn't help that I was a terribly shy kid, growing up at an international school, where my mother was a teacher and my schoolmates came from 56 different countries. Doing well in school meant getting into a good college in America, getting a good job, becoming an American citizen, and supporting them when they got old. That's all we talked about.
Nervous Translation is at once childlike and mysterious, straight and metaphorical. How did you approach telling the story from the point of view of a little girl?
The script itself is very minimal, with actions rather than words. I didn't want our young actress, Jana Agoncillo [who plays Yael], to overact, so we chose not to explain the psychology behind Yael's actions, only for her to do them and in a fairly deadpan way. The house we found has a particular layout with a long hallway that I felt could act as a kind of passageway for many things, such as the space in between Yael's inner and outer worlds. I am a visual person, and quite meticulous in my image choices. But I am like a child again when it comes to sound; it's like another world, quite unfamiliar to me but with so many possibilities informed by intuition more than anything else. The editing and sound design allowed us to break free of the constraints of the image to [provide] a portrait of the quintessential Filipino family nowadays, since the 80s, when we only see and hear fragments of one another, and always in spurts.
