MEKONG 2030
Produced by the Luang Prabang Film Festival, "MEKONG 2030" is a collection of short narrative films that envision the future of the Mekong River from five different national and cultural perspectives. Set in the year 2030, they aim to both entertain and inspire audiences to actively protect this critical life source.
Anocha Suwichakornpong
Kulikar Sotho
Anysay Keola
Lan Pham Ngoc
Sai Naw Kham
Also Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong
Thursday resulted from the famous Danish CPH-Dox projects whereby two filmmakers (one European, one non-European) collaborate. Suwichakornpong and Kameric wrote visual dialogues from Asia and Europe, as it were.
A kaleidoscopic video essay exploring the state of contemporary Thailand.
The chronicles of a day in the life of a nameless woman as she wanders around Singapore. Part documentary part video essay, 'Nightfall' is a fictionalized account of Suwichakornpong's time spent during a residency researching Thai politics in a foreign land.
A film director and her muse who was a student activist in the 1970s, a waitress who keeps changing jobs, an actor and an actress, all live loosely connected to each other by almost invisible threads. The narrative sheds its skin several times to reveal layer upon layer of the complexities that make up the characters’ lives.
Focuses on a woman who lives across time and is an eyewitness to the collapse of the three kingdoms of Siam, as Thailand was then known.
This short video is set in Mahachai, a town less than an hour away from Bangkok known for its seafood processing industry. The town, geographically situated by the river, is the site of many factories and has the highest number of Burmese workers outside of Burma. It is estimated that as many as 300,000 Burmese reside in Mahachai. Most of the Burmese are working, both legally and illegally, in these factories. Just like any other day in Mahachai, Wawa Kai, a Burmese immigrant worker wakes up. She brushes her teeth and takes a cold shower. She goes to work at a factory where she grades squids and shrimps according to their sizes. But today she is not feeling well, and has to take the afternoon off.
Explores the relationship between Ake, a young man who is paralyzed from the waist down after an accident, and Pun, the male nurse who takes care of him, and of course Ake's father. Ake is at first cold towards his nurse Pun, but as Pun continues to earnestly take care of him he starts to open up his heart through candid conversations. The physical contact with Pun makes him rethink physical desires that he wants to forget. The grudge he held against his father slowly abates. All of this slowly becomes the motivating factor to confirm that he is alive, albeit with physical problems.
A man and a mysterious women explore Bangkok over the course of one night.
Lublae is a district in northern Thailand that used to be known as the 'hidden' land, due to its remote location ('lub' means 'hidden' in Thai). Others say that Lublae is a derivative of Lublang, the name of the forest in the area. 'Lang' means 'evening' in the language of Lanna (an old kingdom in present day northern Thailand) as the forest was so dense it often got dark before sunset. Legend has it that the residents of Lublae were all women and that they tolerated no lies, no matter how small.
Also Directed by Kulikar Sotho
This omnibus film brings together three globally acclaimed directors from Asia with a common theme 'Living Together in Asia' to depict the lives of characters who journey between Japan, Cambodia, the Philippines and Malaysia. Brillante Mendoza grapples with the issue of loss of national identity and home, with a story set in the Obihiro area of Hokkaido and Manila in the Philippines. Isao Yukisada directs a story in Malaysia where the Japanese army was once stationed but is now home to many Japanese retirees living out their remaining years. An elderly man has parted from his family in Japan to live alone in Penang, but when a new helper comes to the house, he slowly opens his mind and an unexpected bond forms between the two. Finally director Sotho Kulikar conveys a beautiful but heart-rending love story between a Japanese man and Cambodian woman that unfolds across past and present against the backdrop of Cambodia's civil war.
A lost film, buried beneath Cambodia's killing fields, reveals different versions of the truth. A contemporary story about love, family and the ghosts of Cambodia's past.
Also Directed by Anysay Keola
AT THE HORIZON is about two different worlds colliding: the wealthy influential people on the one hand and the poor and honest on the other hand. Sin, a wealthy boy had been spoiled by his parents and has never realized the importance of self-dependence and how to become a responsible man. The boy lives his life relying on his parents wealth and power,making him even more arrogant and pompous. Lud, a mute middle-aged man came from a rural area to be a motorcycle mechanic in Vientiane. His wife worked as a market woman and they had a six-year-old daughter. Though Luds life was simple, his family was warm and loving. One day Lud unexpectedly faces the greatest loss of his life caused by Sin.
Noy, a male medical graduate who seems to lead a perfect life, is pressured by his parents to marry his beautiful rich girlfriend. When he can no longer deny and hide his sexual preference, he risks the consequences to tell his parents the truth. At the same time, Noy, a Hmong woman from a poor family in Xiengkhouang province, looks forward to celebrating her graduation after a long struggle to support herself in Vientiane. However, her parents' arrival brings not the joy she expected, but the need to decide whether to remain in Vientiane with her musician crush or get married overseas in order to repay her parents' debt.
A love story about a man with an unnatural talent for seeing the end date in relationships. It’s not his instinct, it’s his nose hairs. Kai’s nose tells him it’s time to get out of the relationship he is in just as an old school mate comes back into his life. They take to the road and lead us on a wild and charming journey through the Lao mountains of Vang Vieng.
Love stories of 5 different persons in Vientiane reflect nuanced and atypical relationships with romance, heartbreak and humor.
Also Directed by Lan Pham Ngoc
Utilizing the banality of Vietnamese state radio broadcasts, The Story of Ones gives a face and a sense of place to the unseen and offers a personal counterpoint to the officially sanctioned. Like entering a roomful of stories, the viewer steps into an unfamiliar space guided only by the sound of the radio tuning in to lifestyle programming, call-in shows and radio dramas. The portraits and settings layered atop the aural landscape create questions, provide humor, offer context and withdraw explanation of what once seemed clear before entering the room.
When the urban landscape shapes the human relations: a mature woman, a bride and a group of young people seek proximity in the anonymity of the big city.
MRS. NGUYỆN (a Vietnamese blue collar retiree, who once worked in East Germany as a labor export worker), returns to Berlin where she inherits a cremation urn with her German ex-husband’s ashes and his pet slow loris monkey (CU LI). After managing to smuggle both the urn and the pet Cu Li back to Vietnam, MRS. NGUYỆN embarks on a journey retracing the steps of her memories to scatter her husband’s ashes at the hydroelectric plant where they first met.
Stories told along the river: a woman reunites with her ex-lover at a hydroelectric plant; meanwhile, a young man travels downstream to a temple in search of a cure for his insomnia.
The video creates an odd story, in which the old monitor is dragged around the precinct of an old French building while screening some ‘breaking television’ footages from Youtube.
In the dune landscape of a cemetery, or is it golf course? Past and present converge in the search for a grave.
Also Directed by Sai Naw Kham
An old woman from Mong Htet in northern Shan State in Myanmar looks back on a life marked by privation and loss. Her memories are interwoven with images that touch on this conflicted state’s past, present and future. A quietly poetic and evocative work about the rhythms of daily life, mortality and the persistence of memory.