Directors break a few eggs for Thai Short

Eggs are a running theme of the Thai Short Film and Video Festival, with the posters usually featuring egg shapes. This year’s design has a female body with a camera for a head ready to break out of her egg-like womb.
The symbolism is apt, especially as many directors, even the men, have said that the films are their babies and making them is like giving birth.
Continuing with the theme of eggs, there’s the festival bumper, a short clip that precedes each programme at the festival, which is running at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre through September 1. A new bumper is made each year, usually by well-known directors who got their start at the fest, and they almost always incorporate eggs.
Yolking it up this year is Sivaroj “Karn” Kongsakul, whose short films “Always” and “Silencio” won awards in the Thai Short fest in 2006 and 2007. He’s since cracked on with longer films, with his 2011 debut feature “Eternity” (“Tee Rak”) winning the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam fest.
Karn’s two-minute bumper features a girl sitting in front of a white background holding a single egg in her hand.
“I love this work,” she says. “I have been doing it. I have fought for it. Either successful or unsuccessful, it’s a way of life.”
She then drops the egg and looks at where it splattered on the floor, which is basically all a filmmaker can do once they’ve completed their work and thrown it up on big screens for everyone to see.
As the saying goes, you have break a few eggs to make an omelette, and Karn’s made his share.
Apart from Karn’s bumper and the usual dozens of Thai shorts in competition in this year’s festival, there are a few other local ingredients in the mix.
Veteran producer-director Pimpaka Towira offers her cheerily titled “Death Trilogy”, a compilation of three shorts she’s made since 2010.
“My Father” involves the political situation that year, and has a railway worker from upcountry who is forced to quit his job because of a protest letter he wrote. He then heads off to Bangkok in search of justice and joins the red-shirt rally. After the rally’s end, he returns home a loser with a deep wound in his heart from his failures.
“The Mother” from last year has a grieving mum at the funeral of her 13-year-old daughter. Haunted by the girl’s mysterious passing, the mother is in search of answers.
The trio is completed by Pimpaka’s latest film, “Malaria and Mosquitoes”, which finds a widowed Karen woman caught in the limbo of statelessness.
It screens at 5 tomorrow and 6.45pm next Thursday.
Another programme worth mentioning is the Digital Forum, which started a few years back as a spotlight for digital media. In this category, the meaning of short film is stretched to medium length and sometimes far beyond.
That’s the case with the 222-minute “Thawathosamat”, Punlop Horharin’s examination of Thailand’s shifting religions, from animism to Hinduism and Buddhism and how these beliefs mixed and became the conception of the nation. It screens at 1 tomorrow.
More succinct but just as philosophical is the 34-minute “1674.38 How the Earth Around Us” by Wairin Mathong, which has a student transferred to a new school and struggling to keep up as the world whizzes by. It screens at 3 on Sunday.
There are several other entries in the Digital Forum, but they and many other Thai shorts don’t have English subtitles, so please check the programme before you enter the screenings to avoid causing disruptions. Usually there’s two screenings going on, and if one doesn’t have subtitles, it’s a good bet the other one will.
Special mention in Locarno
Nontawat Numbenchapol’s latest ripped-from-the-headlines documentary “By the River” (“Sai Nam Tid Shoer”) received a special mention at last week’s 66th Locarno Film Festival.
Making its world premiere in the Swiss film fest’s Windows of Discovery competition, “By the River” deals with the environmental destruction along Klity Creek in Kanchanaburi, where contamination from a lead mine ruined livelihoods for a Karen village. A lawsuit over the matter made headlines as it dragged on in courts for 15 years.
Just last month, Nontawat made news with another documentary, “Boundary”, which pressed the hot-button topic of the Preah Vihear Temple area on the Thai-Cambodian border. After its premiere at the Berlin festival, Nontawat brought it back to Thailand and aimed to give it a big release in cinemas. However, the film’s political nature caused theatre operator Major Cineplex to have second thoughts. Nontawat was still able to show “Boundary”, but in a scaled-back run in which he had to hire out the theatres himself and sell his own tickets.
Other awards in Locarno included the top-prize Golden Leopard for Albert Serra’s “Story of My Death”, Best Actress for Brie Larson in “Short Term 12”, best actor to Fernando Bacilio for the Vega brothers’ “El Mudo” and best director to South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo for “Our Suhni”. The Variety Piazza Grand Award went to Balthasar Kormakur’s action flick “2 Guns”.