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Unlocking the INDEPENDENTS

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ALMOST A DECADE has passed since filmmaker Pimpaka Towira started work on her second feature “The Island Funeral” and it is with a large sigh of relief that she is now seeing the film finally screening in Bangkok cinema.

Pimpaka is well aware of the problems faced by local independent directors in getting their works released in Thailand even though, like “The Island Funeral”, which won Best Asian Future Film Award from Tokyo International Film Festival last year and recently picked up the Best Cinematography prize at the Shanghai International Film Festival, many of them have enjoyed international success.

Her first feature, “One Night Husband”, was made back in the days before finding a studio became so hard. It was produced and released in 2003 by GMM Pictures, the short-lived subsidiary of entertainment giant GMM Grammy, which merged with Tai Entertainment and Hub Ho Hin the following year to become GTH and moved into the mainstream.

In 2008, Pimpaka introduced the “Director’s Screen Project” which brought award-winning films like Aditya Assarat’s “Wonderful Town” and her own documentary feature “The Truth Be Told: The Cases Against Supinya Klangnarong” to Thai screens. The project continued with the release of Anocha Suwichakornpong’s “Mundane History”, Uruphong Raksasad’s “Agrarian Utopia”, Sivaroj Kongsakul’s “Eternity” and Aditya “Hi-So”.

More recently Pimpaka and other independent filmmakers joined with SF Cinema in creating “Unlock Indies”, an initiative that will see independent films screening at the theatre chain. So far, Unlock Indies has released “Distance”, an omnibus film produced by the Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or winner Anthony Chen that stars Taiwanese actor Chen Bo-Lin, and Uruphong Raksasad’s “Rice Trilogy”, which was back in the cinema for another well-deserved round of screenings.

Pimpaka’s “The Island Funeral” is also a part of the programme and is being shown at SF World Cinema for a limited run,

“My film is a small film, and it is difficult nowadays to do a wide release of a small film, as cinemas don’t have enough slots for films. In the past there were more ways to get round this but today we have more independent films.” Pimpaka explains.

Indeed, back in 2003, “One Night Husband” was released on 40 screens across Bangkok, whereas “The Island Funeral” has just the one screen and only one showing per day.

“It’s better not to release single films,” she continues. “It’s a much better idea to group films from several directors as a package and show them together. I believe that a variety of films can help attract more attention from the audience, and this |is what Unlock Indies aims to do.”

“The Island Funeral” tells the story of a Muslim woman from Bangkok who takes a road trip to visit her aunt in Pattani, one of the three Southern provinces affected by separatist violence. Many problems were faced during production, not least because it was partially filmed in Pattani, and it took a full eight years before it premiered at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival.

It has since travelled to various festivals around the world including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Goteborg Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival and Seattle International Film Festival, where it has received critical acclaim.

Now she is hoping that the message in the film will reach as many Thai people as possible “I hope that Thais will understand this film better than a foreign audience because it is made for a Thai audience. I hope that what I try to say in the film will reflect what people feel. In the middle of the conflict in our society, is it possible to remain neutral? Can we live without taking sides?

“I also expect the audience to change their attitude toward independent films. Some people have this strange idea that all Thai independent films look the same. I want to change that. Independent films are just films made outside studios. However, I don’t know if we will be able to make money from these films, as we don’t have the budget to promote them. We are so small compared to the big budget films around us,” she says.

 

This source first appeared on The Nation Life.


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