Posted by editor@vimooz.com on September 9, 2008 under Bangkok International Film Festival | 
Nonzee Nimibutr’s Thai action-fantasy film “Queens of Langkasuka” will open the eighth annual Bangkok International Film Festival on Sept. 23, organizers said on Tuesday.
A sneak preview of some outstanding and highly acclaimed movies selected for the Bangkok International Film Festival 2008. Between the 23rd and 30th September, over sixty films will be screened -the result of rigorous selection by the festival selection committee.
BIRDSONG [El cant dels ocells]
Category : World Cinema
Country : Spain
Director: Albert Serra Juanola
The nativity story is retold, but this time from a rather different point of view. The second feature by Catalan director Albert Serra tells the story of the journey of the three Kings to visit Jesus. The story is told simply and without embellishment. The progress of the three men, who are elderly is sometimes slow. In color and black and white, the journey itself is as important as the destination, and the stunning landscapes with deep blacks are a vital component. One of the discoveries of the Cannes Film Festival 2008, this story has enthralled audiences who prefer their drama to be natural and minimalist.
Serra is finding voluptuous, humble nobility in a non-dramatic, non-story, and non-character based cinema, and it is a wonder to behold.
Daniel Kasman - The Auteur’s Notebook
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
Category : World Cinema
Country : Sweden
Director: Tomas Alfredson
This unique and extraordinary film is hard to classify. It’s a coming of age story, a serial killer mystery, a dark comedy, a touching drama, and undeniably a horror film.
Oskar is an outsider, tormented at school, who befriends a strange girl who has moved in next door. But soon he begins to realize that there may be a connection between his new friend and a spate of serial murders in the area. It boasts two excellent central performances, gorgeous cinematography, a haunting soundtrack, and some quite disturbing scenes of gore and violence. It could perhaps be that rare and precious thing – the thinking man’s horror film.
It has won a number of major international awards, including the Best Narrative Feature Award from TRIBECA International Film Festival , Best European Fantasy Feature Award from Neuchatel International Film Festival and Metro Critics Award from Natfilm Festival Copenhagen.
The film is beautifully shot and anchored by very strong performances from its young leads and stands quite easily as the most compelling new entry into vampire mythos in … well, as long as I can remember. An exceptional piece of work, Let The Right One In comes with the highest possible recommendation.
Todd Brown – Twitch Film
UP THE YANGTZE
Category : Documentary
Country : Canada
Director: Yung Chang
The Chinese Three Gorges Dam was first proposed in 1919. But it wasn’t till the 1950s that Mao Zedong started to put the plan into action. The dam is now 1½ miles wide, and more than 600 feet high, floods almost 400 square miles, and displaced two million people.
It is considered by some experts to be one of the world’s greatest eco-disasters. But this sensitive and beautifully documented film concentrates on the effects upon individual lives; from those who have lost their farms and livelihoods to those who learn to work for the tourist dollar. Director Yung Chang focuses on the lives of two teenagers working on a cruise-ship. He manages to avoid an indignant or accusatory tone, instead allowing the story to tell itself, with irony, tragedy, and even humour.
Up the Yangtze has won many Film Festival awards including Best Canadian Documentary Award from Vancouver International Film Festival 2007 ,
“Up the Yangtze” won the Golden Gate Award for best documentary at the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, and its easy to see why. From its insight into lives and an economy in transition to its haunting, moving images, it’s quite a cruise.
G. Allen Johnson – San Francisco Chronicle
BE LIKE OTHERS
Category : Documentary
Country : Canada / Iran / UK / USA
Director: Tanaz Eshaghian
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Yet sex-change operations are legal. This remarkable documentary traces the lives of those who choose this most radical surgery in pursuit of what one man calls simply, “a decent life”, assisted by the country’s best-established gender reassignment surgeon, Dr. Bahram Mir Jalali.
Eshagian always maintains a calm objectivity, as he follows his subjects through their pre-operative deliberations to the results, and the effects on their lives and relationships.
Be Like Others won the Amnesty International Film Prize – Special Mention Award at the Berlin International Film Festival 2008 and was nominated for the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
a powerful window into a once-hidden side of the country… a model of non-dogmatic filmmaking on a highly charged topic.
Robert Koehler - Variety
MY WINNIPEG
Category : World Cinema
Country : Canada
Director: Guy Maddin
Apparently Winnipeg’s city fathers commissioned this film as a documentary; to be made by “the mad poet of Manitoba,” as a Canadian magazine termed him. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, such an exercise might have had rather tedious results. But Maddin’s film elevates its subject matter to almost mystical heights.
Maddin describes his work as a ‘docu-fantasia’. The viewer is pulled in to a strange, almost dream-like world drawn from his memory and emotions. It paints a picture of the city, but one that is so impressionistic, whimsical, and personal, that one might be excused for thinking that the town was fictional.
Describing My Winnipeg is almost impossible. One has to see it for oneself.
Best Canadian Feature Film – Toronto International Film Festival - 2007
Probably the only film ever to mix Freud, Proust and a love of ice hockey, My Winnipeg is a joyous, mischievous, hilarious flight of fancy. It’s also a strangely profound demonstration of the way film can reanimate faded memory and bring ghosts back to life. Flying in the face of a much-loved American motto, My Winnipeg uses some of cinema’s simplest and most eloquent resources to prove that, in film, you actually can go home again.
Jonathan Romney – The Independent
If you love movies in the very sinews of your imagination, you should experience the work of Guy Maddin… Shot for shot, Maddin can be as surprising and delightful as any filmmaker has ever been. See this film!
Roger Ebert
THE BETRAYAL [Nerakhoon]
Category : Documentary Section
Country : US / Laos
Director: Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath
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Ellen Kuras is a renowned cinematographer, who has worked for Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Michel Gondry, Julian Schnabel, and Spike Lee. Thus, this documentary is a beautiful, lyrical story, with the aesthetic qualities of a Hollywood drama.
However, it has at its heart a real and emotive story of a Laotian family who fled from Laos to America in the 1970s, but instead of a better life, found poverty, racism, and South Asian gang wars.
Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival
A labor of love over twenty years in the making, the doc combines rich, elegiac images of the Laotians and their land, meditative music, prophetic folk wisdom told in voiceover, footage from the Vietnam era (from utter devastation to empty presidential speeches), Thavi as a teenage long-hair in Brooklyn, wayward youth framed metaphorically against a backdrop of moving trains—all stitched together like a patchwork quilt, like shards of a dream. The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) is slow-paced but not slow moving—thoroughly engrossing.
Lauren Wissot – thehousenextdooronline.com
SLINGSHOT [Tirador]
Category : Southeast Asian Panorama Section
Country : Philippines
Director: Brillante Mendoza
Brillante takes a verite look at life in a Manila slum. In the central district of Quiapo, thousands of people are cramped into tiny, squalid spaces. Against a background of fervid religious ceremonies and the excitement of the forthcoming local elections, this documentary follows the desperate lives of a group of slum-dwellers.
One character Caloy, tries to find an honest living, but finds the obstacles overwhelming. Others find refuge in drugs; we see a young father taking his child into a crackhouse.
Others are drawn into a life of crime from which it is almost impossible to escape.
Meanwhile local political candidates make speeches promising a better life.
It’s as fascinating and compelling as it is disturbing.
Slingshot won the Special Jury Award (Official Competition) from Marrakech International Film Festival 2007 and the Caligari Prize from Berlin International Film Festival 2008.
a wickedly energetic portrait of Manila street life… Mendoza depicts their many hardships and fleeting joys with great urgency, capturing the bustle of the city whether the action at hand is a religious service, a cellphone-snatching or a police beating
Jason Anderson – eyeweekly.com
