Raiding the archives

he 6th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival gets underway tomorrow and this edition, on the theme “Raiding the Archives”, promises to be particularly interesting, as it features rare footage dating back more than 60 years.
In preparing for the fest, the curatorial team has visited institutional and independent audio-visual archives in many countries, searching out distinguished movies and old time experimental films.
The screenings kick off tomorrow at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. Other venues hosting the event, which wraps on February 5, are the Goethe-Institut and the William Warren Library at Jim Thompson House.
Tomorrow’s BACC screenings open at noon with the winner of the 2011 Jeonju International Film Festival audience award by Kim Kyung-man that looks back at Korea in an age of US domination with re-edited newsreel and propaganda footage.
On Sunday at 1.45pm, also at the BACC, viewers can see a rare movie shot by a pioneering female amateur filmmaker in New Zealand, who took up 16mm cinematography in the late 1920s and 1930s. The programme, presented as an illustrated talk by curator Mark Williams, will juxtapose the archival material with examples of the same footage repurposed by contemporary film and video artists.
The first poetic documentary made in the early 1950s for Unesco, “World Without End” (1953), was partly shot in Thailand by British experimental filmmaker Basil Wright, and captures with unusual lyricism a landscape on the cusp of modernisation. Paul Rotha, one of cinema’s first theorists, directed this very special documentary. It shows on February 4 at the BACC at 6.15pm.
Two special programmes devoted to Thai experimental films will examine the origins of Thai experimental practices in home movies and video art. Other programmes curated by artists and cinema archivists from Asia and Europe include the KL Experimental Film Festival (KLEX), Hanoi Doclab and Experimenta India. 
A selection of experimental video art pieces from the 7th edition of CologneOFF curated by Agricola de Cologne and Six-Pack-film will be shown at the Goethe-Institut on Wednesday and Thursday starting at 7pm.
BEFF6 curator George Clark will give a talk on February 3 at the William Warren Library at 6pm drawing on his experience of presenting, teaching and writing about artists’ cinema. Clark’s talk will be followed by a roundtable discussion with Southeast Asian independent cinema groups comparing experiences of programming and showing works.
Other selections include works from Hanoi DOCLAB chronicling everyday life and history from Vietnam with an introduction and post-screening Q&A with the Hanoi DOCLAB team. 

Find out more at www.beffbeff.com and Facebook.com/bangkokexperimentalFFon 1-2 February.