Naraporn Chan-ocha, left, and Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha hold a krathong Thursday at Government House.
BANGKOK — From former prime ministers and junta leaders to regular folks, Thais kingdom-wide purchased krathongs to loy (float) for the annual festival Thursday night.
The festival was much more toned down last year due to the mourning period following King Rama IX’s death in October 2016.
Here’s how it looked.
Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha celebrates Loy Krathong 2018
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Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha went live for the first time via his official Facebook page as he floated a krathong at Government House with his wife Naraporn Chan-ocha.
“I hope the country is safe, and that the media are lovely,” Prayuth said when asked what he had wished.
Ousted former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra also took to social media to express her thoughts.
“I want to float krathongs with fellow Thais so much, but all I can do is send my sentiments,” Yingluck posted Thursday evening on Facebook from self-imposed exile.
Meanwhile, crowds descended on both sides of the riverbank by the Rama VIII Bridge to float their krathongs in a temple fair-like atmosphere. With steps leading down to the water on the western bank on the Rama VII Park, some even swam into the brackish water to push their krathongs further into the stream.
Loy Krathong 2018 at Rama VIII Bridge
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A more mall-going crowd traveled to the newly opened riverside megamall Iconsiam, some in full, traditional costume.
Loy Krathong 2018 at Iconsiam
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Actress Kannarun Wongkajornklai, left, prepares to float a krathong Thursday night at Iconsiam.
A little upstream, revelers also floated krathongs at the Phra Phuttha Yodfa Bridge.
Loy Krathong 2018 at Phra Phuttha Yodfa Bridge
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Down in Phuket, expats and locals alike gathered at the Bang Ma Ruan Lake to celebrate.
Phuket celebrates Loy Krathong at Bang Ma Ruan Lake
Workers collect krathongs Friday morning from a pond inside Kasetsart University in Bangkok.
BANGKOK — Although it was the first full-blown Loy Krathong celebration in two years, the morning-after waste in Bangkok did not increase much from last year.
In its annual accounting of waste deposited in the capital’s waterways overnight, City Hall said Friday it had collected a total of 841,327 krathongs from across the capital by 6am. That was just under 4 percent more than last year, while those made of organic and degradable materials increased to over 94 percent of all krathongs, according to administrators.
Gov. Aswin Kwanmuang praised the public for recognizing the impact the festival has on the environment as only 44,883 styrofoam krathongs were recovered, about 1 percent less than last year.
The most foam krathongs were found in the Rat Burana district, with the most krathongs overall in Lat Krabang district.
All krathongs cleaned up from the water last night will be disposed of, with those made of biodegradable materials going to a natural fertilizer factory in the Nong Khaem district. Foam or non-degradable krathongs will end up in landfills.
The cleanup went on similarly across the nation. Here’s how it looked elsewhere.
Volunteers and public workers collect krathongs from a canal in Uthai Thani province.A large amount of krathongs piled up in the moat in Korat.Krathongs washed up under a pier in Ubon Ratchathani province.Workers clean up krathongs from a pond in the Sukhothai Historical Park.
Two men walk past an electronic board showing Hong Kong share index outside a bank Thursday in Hong Kong. Photo: Kin Cheung / Associated Press
SINGAPORE — Asian markets were mostly lower on Friday as traders dwelled on risks from a drawn out dispute between the U.S. and China. Wall Street was closed Thursday for Thanksgiving.
Keeping Score
Thailand’s SET traded at 1,606.48 Friday morning, a 0.1 percent gain. South Korea’s Kospi shed 0.7 percent to 2,055.30. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index dropped 0.7 percent to 25,845.78 and the Shanghai Composite gave up 1.4 percent to 2,608.32. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 bucked the trend, adding 0.4 percent to 5,713.90. Shares fell in Taiwan and Singapore but rose in Indonesia. Japanese markets are closed for a holiday.
US-China Trade
U.S. President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will meet at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina next week. The leaders are hoping to unwind a spiraling dispute over Beijing’s technology policy and trade practices. The countries have placed additional tariffs on billions of dollars of each other’s goods, which has fueled worries over softening global growth.
Nissan Firing
Japanese automaker Nissan Motor Co. has fired Carlos Ghosn as its chairman, after he was arrested for alleged financial improprieties. The powerful executive has been credited for Nissan’s revival from near bankruptcy. He will continue to remain chairman of French carmaker Renault, whose shares plunged after Ghosn’s arrest and have yet to fully recover. Renault owns 43 percent of Nissan, and Nissan owns 15 percent of Renault. Ghosn is also chairman of Mitsubishi Motors Corp, which will hold a board meeting next week in reaction.
Analyst’s Take
“With U.S. markets away for Thanksgiving and there lacking fresh leads, the risk-off tone looks to continue dominating into the end of the week,” Jingyi Pan of IG said in a market commentary.
Energy
Benchmark U.S. crude lost 75 cents to USD$53.88 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract gained $1.20 to close at $54.63 in New York on Wednesday. Brent crude, the international standard, lost 2 cents to $62.58. It lost 88 cents to $62.60 in London.
Currencies
The dollar was flat at 112.95 yen. The euro strengthened to $1.1410 from $1.1403. The pound extended its gains to $1.2880 from $1.2879, on news that Britain and the European Union had reached a deal in principle on future relations.
Clouds hang over the North Sentinel Island, in 2005 in India's southeastern Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Photo: Gautam Singh / Associated Press
NEW DELHI — For thousands of years, the people of North Sentinel Island have been isolated from the rest of the world.
They use spears and bows and arrows to hunt the animals that roam the small, heavily forested island, and gather plants to eat and to fashion into homes. Their closest neighbors live more than 50 kilometers (30 miles) away. Deeply suspicious of outsiders, they attack anyone who comes through the surf and onto their beaches.
Police say that is what happened last week when a young American, John Allen Chau, was killed by islanders after paying fishermen to take him to the island.
“The Sentinelese want to be left alone,” said the anthropologist Anup Kapur.
Scholars believe the Sentinelese migrated from Africa roughly 50,000 years ago, but most details of their lives remain completely unknown.
“We do not even know how many of them are there,” said Anvita Abbi, who has spent decades studying the tribal languages of India’s Andaman and Nicobar islands. North Sentinel is an outpost of the island chain, which is far closer to Myanmar and Thailand than to mainland India. Estimates on the group’s size range from a few dozen to a few hundred.
“What language they speak, how old it is, it’s anybody’s guess,” Abbi said. “Nobody has access to these people.”
And, she said, that is how it should be.
“Just for our curiosity, why should we disturb a tribe that has sustained itself for tens of thousands of years?” she asked. “So much is lost: People are lost, language is lost, their peace is lost.”
For generations, Indian officials have heavily restricted visits to North Sentinel, with contact limited to rare “gift-giving” encounters, with small teams of officials and scientists leaving coconuts and bananas for the islanders.
Any contact with such isolated people can be dangerous, scholars say, with islanders having no resistance to diseases outsiders carry.
“We have become a very dangerous people,” said P.C. Joshi, an anthropology professor at Delhi University. “Even minor influences can kill them.”
Because of this, Abbi said scholars who visit isolated peoples are careful to limit their visits to a few hours a day and to stay away even if they have minor coughs or colds.
Many of the island chain’s other tribes have been decimated over the past century, lost to disease, intermarriage and migration.
Survival International, an organization that works for the rights of tribal people, said Chau may have been encouraged by recent changes to Indian rules about visiting isolated islands in the Andamans.
While special permissions are still required, visits are now theoretically allowed in some parts of the Andamans where they used to be entirely forbidden.
“The authorities lifted one of the restrictions that had been protecting the Sentinelese tribe’s island from foreign tourists, which sent exactly the wrong message, and may have contributed to this terrible event,” the group said in a statement.
Vitaly Kulyushin at the annual general of the Thai-Russian Chamber of Commerce’s annual meeting in April 2015. Original image: Thai-Russian Chamber of Commerce / Facebook
BANGKOK — Police have arrested a Russian in Chonburi on Thursday for allegedly forging hundreds of visas to Thailand.
Vitaly Garyevich Kulyushin was taken into custody by officers from the Technology Crime Suppression Division and accused of selling forged Thai visas to Russians, Maj. Gen. Surachate “Big Joke” Hakparn announced Thursday.
Kulyushin was the consul at the Royal Thai Honorary Consulate in Vladivostok from 2011 to 2014, police said. He was suspended from his job after Thailand’s Foreign Affairs Ministry complained of his misconduct in 2014. He was later discharged from his post in 2016.
Though his right to use the official consular stamp was revoked, Kulyushin did not surrender it despite a warning that year to do so.
Thai immigration found irregularities in the visas issued by Vladivostok when he was there. In 2014, they found two Russians with one-year, multiple-entry visas that had been sent by mail through a Cambodian travel company and a middleman in Kuala Lumpur.
Since last year, 60-year-old Kulyushin was advertising on a now defunct website that he could issue Thai visas and stamp documents for RUB5,400 (2,700 baht). Police said he’s sold more than 100 visas amounting to roughly 400,000 baht alone this year.
He is charged with forging international government documents, fraud and violating the Computer Crime Act.
Both Thais and Russians can travel visa-free to each other’s countries for 30 days.
In this October 2018 photo, American adventurer John Allen Chau, right, stands for a photograph with Founder of Ubuntu Football Academy Casey Prince, 39, in Cape Town, South Africa, days before he left for in a remote Indian island of North Sentinel Island, where he was killed. Photo: Sarah Prince / Associated Press
NEW DELHI — Indian authorities were struggling Thursday to figure out how to recover the body of an American killed last week after wading ashore on an isolated island cut off from the modern world.
John Allen Chau was killed by North Sentinel islanders who apparently shot him with arrows and then buried his body on the beach, police say.
But even officials don’t travel to North Sentinel, where people live as their ancestors did thousands of years ago, and where outsiders are seen with suspicion and attacked.
“It’s a difficult proposition,” said Dependera Pathak, director-general of police on India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where North Sentinel is located. “We have to see what is possible, taking utmost care of the sensitivity of the group and the legal requirements.”
Police are consulting anthropologists, tribal welfare experts, forest experts and scholars to figure out a way to recover the body, he said.
While visits to the island are forbidden, Chau paid fishermen last week to take him to the island. He used a kayak to paddle to shore, bringing gifts including a football and fish.
He interacted with some of the tribesmen — who survive by hunting, fishing and collecting wild plants and are known for attacking anyone who comes near with bows and arrows and spears — until they became angry and shot an arrow at him. The 26-year-old adventurer and Christian missionary then swam back to the fishermen’s boat waiting at a safe distance.
That night, he wrote about his visit and left his notes with the fishermen. He returned to North Sentinel the next day, Nov. 16.
What happened then isn’t known, but on the morning of the following day, the fishermen watched from the boat as tribesmen dragged Chau’s body along the beach and buried his remains.
Pathak said the seven people have been arrested for helping Chau, including five fishermen, a friend of Chau’s and a local tourist guide.
“It was a case of misdirected adventure,” Pathak said.
Chau was apparently shot and killed by arrows, but the cause of death can’t be confirmed until his body is recovered, Pathak said.
In an Instagram post, his family said it was mourning him as a “beloved son, brother, uncle and best friend to us.” The family also said it forgave his killers and called for the release of those who assisted him in his quest to reach the island.
“He ventured out on his own free will and his local contacts need not be persecuted for his own actions,” the family said.
Authorities say Chau arrived in the area on Oct. 16 and stayed on another island while he prepared to travel to North Sentinel. It was not his first time in the region: he had visited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 2015 and 2016. North Sentinel is part of the Andaman Islands and sits at the intersection of the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.
With help from a friend, Chau hired fishermen for $325 to take him there on a boat, Pathak said.
After the fishermen realized Chau had been killed, they left for Port Blair, the capital of the island chain, where they broke the news to Chau’s friend, who in turn notified his family, Pathak said.
Police surveyed the island by air on Tuesday, and a team of police and forest department officials used a coast guard boat to travel there Wednesday and another trip was planned Thursday.
India has a very hands-off approach to the island’s people. Tribespeople killed two Indian fishermen in 2006 when their boat broke loose and drifted onto the shore, but Indian media reports say officials did not investigate or prosecute anyone in the deaths.
Chau had wanted ever since high school to go to North Sentinel to share Jesus with the indigenous people, said Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Covenant Journey, a program that takes college students on tours of Israel to affirm their Christian faith. Chau went through that program in 2015.
“He didn’t go there for just adventure. I have no question it was to bring the gospel of Jesus to them,” Staver said.
Chau was carrying a Bible that was hit by an arrow when he was first shot at by the tribesmen on Nov. 15, according to notes Chau left with the fishermen that Staver said he has seen.
Staver said Chau’s last notes to his family on Nov. 16 told them that they might think he was crazy but that he felt it was worth it and asked that they not be angry if he was killed.
One of Chau’s friends said the American spent a month at his home in Cape Town, South Africa, before going to India.
“If he was taking a risk, he was very aware of it,” said Casey Prince, 39.
The two first met about six years ago, when Chau was a manager on the soccer team at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma. Chau and others on the team traveled to South Africa to volunteer at a soccer program Prince founded
Prince described him as easy to like and driven by twin passions: a love of the outdoors and fervent Christianity.
Before attending Oral Roberts University, Chau had lived in southwestern Washington state and went to Vancouver Christian High School. Phone messages left with relatives were not immediately returned Wednesday.
Survival International, an organization that works for the rights of tribal people, said the killing of the American should prompt Indian authorities to properly protect the lands of the Sentinelese.
BANGKOK — A film set in Isaan was approved by state censors after its makers did away with what they say was its most powerful scene: A monk bawling over his ex-girlfriend’s coffin.
After cutting out the brief scene in which monk Phra Siang despairs at his ex-girlfriend’s funeral, “Thi Baan The Series 2.2” was approved Thursday by the National Film and Video Committee. It will premiere Saturday in cinemas nationwide rated for audiences over 15.
On Tuesday, the filmmakers announced the film had not passed the board because it contained “sensitive” content about Buddhism. The film’s release was indefinitely postponed at the time.
The film, shot in Isaan, is directed by 27-year-old Surasak Pongsorn from Isaan’s Sisaket province. He said the team put in hard work to shoot the scene.
“We prepared for this scene one day and took two days to shoot it because we hoped it would be the saddest part of the film,” Surasak wrote, adding that they had to “beg” a homeowner for permission to shoot the funeral scene as it is considered bad luck.
“If this scene needs to be cut out, I’m okay,” Surasak continued. “But I gotta admit that the film won’t be as perfect as it was meant to be. I feel sorry for the fans who won’t be able to watch the scene, which is supposed to represent the film’s climax.”
“Thi Baan The Series 2.2” was initially scheduled for release in theaters today before it was pulled.
Although the crew agreed to delete the scene, representatives of the Thai Film Director Association on Wednesday demanded the censor board use consistent standards when reviewing movies. They also said the move damages the artistic value of films for audiences.
“The cinematic work will be ruined because that scene is so emotional,” said Thanit Jitnukul, association director. “If the scene is cut out so it can be shown in cinemas, it is once again means Thai audiences get to watch a film that isn’t its best. This has happened many times before.”
Junta leader Prayuth Chan-Ocha points at mackerel Thursday in Bangkok's Minburi Market.
BANGKOK — The Election Commission said Thursday it will investigate whether the military government’s decision to hand out nearly 87 billion baht to the poor during the run-up to the election amounts to illegal vote buying.
The statement by commission president Ittiporn Boonpracong came as the leader of the ruling junta defended his cabinet’s provision of 86.9 billion baht as a transparent means of decreasing the financial burden on low-income Thais.
Speaking on Thursday in Bangkok’s Minburi district, Prayuth defended his cabinet’s resolution this week to dole out additional welfare in the form of one-time and monthly disbursements of cash to registered poor and seniors beginning next month.
Those holding state welfare cards – about 14.5 million low-income Thais – will get 500 baht for New Year’s and 330 baht to help with utility bills every month for 10 months starting December. Seniors over 65 will get a one-time 1,000 baht and 400 baht per month for the same period to help with housing expenses.
“The 500 and 1,000 baht we have was aimed at reducing the burden on the people. They could buy groceries such as shrimp paste and fish sauce. You can buy it at any shop that has a scanner for the cards. Do not let anyone misrepresent that you are buying it from rich [businesses],” Prayuth said.
Four members of Prayuth’s cabinet have registered with political parties that will contest the next election and may attempt to keep the junta leader, who also serves as prime minister, in power afterward.
Critics said Wednesday it was a thinly veiled attempt to win votes with elections promised for just three months from now.
Democrat Party leader Abhisit Vejjajiva said the move was no different from the so-called populist policies the military government criticized after it seized power. Asked if he thought the move was meant to gain an electoral upper hand, Abhisit said he believes the people can see what’s happening.
That was the same sentiment expressed by Chamnan Chanruang, deputy leader of the Future Forward Party, who said the move was a clear example of the kind of campaigning that remains illegal for everyone else.
Pheu Thai Party spokeswoman Ladawan Wongsriwong said Wednesday that the aid would only last 10 months and that beneficiaries should not feel indebted or any gratitude toward the government since it came from taxpayers’ money, not Prayuth.
A child stands in the street in June in China's Henan province. Photo: Ng Han Guan / Associated Press
BEIJING — A car plowed into a crowd of children outside a primary school in northeastern China on Thursday, killing five people and injuring 18, state media reported.
The driver was taken into custody after the crash around noon in the coastal city of Huludao in Liaoning province, state broadcaster CCTV said.
Eighteen people were hospitalized with injuries, the reports said. The cause was under investigation, according to the reports.
Security camera footage showed a line of children crossing the street in front of their school when a car approaches, then changes lanes and swerves into a crowd of the children.
Government spokesmen reached by phone said they were not authorized to release information about the crash.
While it wasn’t clear if the crash was a deliberate attack, China has recently seen a number of such incidents.
Last month, a knife-wielding man drove a vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians in the eastern city of Ningbo, killing two people and wounding 16.
And in September, 11 people were killed and 44 hospitalized after a man drove an SUV deliberately into people at a plaza in the central province of Hunan, before jumping out and attacking victims with a dagger and shovel.
The most common motivations are identified as mental illness, alienation from society or a desire to settle scores.
Other deadly attacks have occurred at schools, including several in 2010 in which nearly 20 children were killed, prompting a response from top government officials and leading many schools to beef up security.
However, in June, a man used a kitchen knife to attack three boys and a mother near a school in Shanghai, killing two of the children. Last year, police said a man set off an explosion at the front gate of a kindergarten in eastern China, which struck as relatives gathered to pick up their children at the end of the day, killing eight people.
Aliosha Herrera at the top of Cinema Oasis. Courtesy Ing K.
She remembers it was a Saturday in the spring of 2007 that she entered a Paris cinema to see her first Thai film.
It was critically acclaimed director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Blissfully Yours.” Afterward, the woman devoured more of his works, including 2004’s Cannes-winning “Tropical Malady.” The next day she returned again to see “Syndromes and a Century.”
What initially was a weekend’s diversion lit a passion that would become the topic of her master’s thesis – “The Invention of a Critical Memory in the Work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.”
“I was enthralled by his narrative inventiveness and profoundly moved by the rural Thailand that he depicted, imbued with ancient tales and ghostly memories,” she said. “I had to choose a topic for my dissertation and it could only be about his works.”
It’s no exaggeration to say that Aliosha Herrera, or “Yo,” has seen more Thai movies than most Thais. The 30-year-old Frenchwoman is not only an admitted hardcore cinephile with a thirst for the Thai oeuvre, but has cultivated enough expertise that she now shares her knowledge with Thai audiences.
Recently Herrera curated a double-feature of two classics, both from 1965, at downtown arthouse theatre Cinema Oasis. “Ngoen, Ngoen, Ngoen” (“Money, Money, Money”) – a blockbuster musical comedy at the time starring Mitr Chaibancha and Petchara Chaowarat – and Rattana Pestonji’s final romantic comedy “Sugar is Not Sweet.”
I felt nostalgic. It’s funny because I had never been to Thailand but I was already nostalgic about Thailand.”
It wasn’t the first time she helped bring a Thai film to new audiences. After 1954’s “Santi-Vina” was rediscovered two years ago, Herrera got the long-lost movie shown in Paris.
Aliosha Herrera in front of a poster promoting her talk at Cinema Oasis. Courtesy Ing K.
Born to French and Panamanian parents, Herrera grew up in the Paris suburb of Arpajon. During her childhood, she, her mother and sister would take monthly trips to small standalone cinemas in the capital, especially those in the fifth arrondissement, aka the Latin Quarter.
“Watching films and discussing them with my family was a whole part of my education,” Herrera said. “The shelves of our home were filled with books and a myriad of classic films on VHS. I also spent a great amount of time at the French Cinematheque, where I could discover many gems of world cinema and exchange views on them with my cinephile friends.”
Though naturally introverted and soft-spoken, Herrera couldn’t hide her love for Thai movies when conversation brought them to the table, literally, as we sipped warm tea recently at Cinema Oasis. When her fluent Thai speaking skill is commended, she smiles shyly and politely says “khob khun ka.”
A promotional poster of Aliosha Herrera’s talk in September at Cinema Oasis.
Learning at the Source
Fascinated by Apichatpong’s cinematic offerings, which left her mind “relentlessly pounding,” Herrera first came to Thailand in 2010. That’s when a door opened to her embrace of a whole new world.
“I wanted to know more about this place, this country,” Herrera said. “[Watching Apichatpong’s films], I felt nostalgic. It’s funny because I had never been to Thailand but I was already nostalgic about Thailand.”
Samanrat “Ing” Kanjanavanit, one half of the daring filmmaker duo behind Cinema Oasis and controversial works such as thebanned “Shakespeare Must Die,” gave high praise.
“In a previous life, she definitely was born Thai,” Ing said.
On her first trip to Bangkok, Herrera visited the Thai Film Archive and met then-director Dome Sukwong. The film archivist is regarded by Herrera as the “Henri Langlois of Thailand” after the French pioneer of filmpreservation.
Dome Sukwong
There she was introduced to 16mm and 35mm Thai oldies, many post-World War II works that were made through the 1970s.
It was at the archive that Herrera embarked on her next level of studying Thai cinema history, since it began in 1897.
It was that knowledge and more she shared with audiences recently at Cinema Oasis in a 2-hour talk touching on the cultural bridge between live cinema vocalists and older Thai traditions, anecdotes of the silver screen’s most important figures and its post-World War II golden age.
The Live Sound Experience
Due to a shortage of 35mm stock after the war, Thai filmmakers shot on 16mm celluloid, with no sound-on-film. Producing silent films was less expensive and made productions easier and faster.
The silent films were then brought to life in theaters by professional voice artists.
Sin Sribunruang, considered the first professional voice dubber who founded the profession in Thailand, in a file image.
That’s when the live performers came in handy. They would add their voices to silent films or do live dubbing of foreign films. Sometimes following the script and sometimes improvising. Some also did live foley work by making sounds to accompany car engines, gunfire and animal noises.
It breathed new life into what had been a traditional art of voice actors performing at shadow plays (nang yai or nang talung) and the masked dance of khon. It made each showing distinctive.
Herrera said she would have loved to have experienced that era, which vanished several decades ago.
“I found this kind of film production tremendously original,” she said.
“By inscribing itself in this oral paradigm, the Thai film production put cinema, a Western invention, at the service of an original local tradition,” Herrera continued. In her home country France, oral accompaniment only existed briefly and had ended by the mid-1920s.
‘Art Out of Time’
After leaving Thailand, Herrera decided to return, this time to research her doctoral thesis focusing on Thai 16mm-format celluloid between 1945 and 1970.
Watching the old films – which offered no English subtitles – Herrera decided to take a leap. She signed up to study Thai for five months and has practiced the language daily since.
Not that it entirely demystifies the old films, many of which contained archaic terms and phrases no longer in usage.
“Sometimes I would not get the jokes in the movies, so I needed to ask or get help from Thai friends,” Herrera said.
A promotional poster for romantic comedy ‘Sugar is Not Sweet’ (1965)
Asked how many Thai films she has seen so far, Herrera said that while her dissertation focused on 39 movies, which she analyzed in detail and translated into French, she has seen hundreds of them.
“I watched as many films as I could,” Herrera said. “[There are] hundreds of Thai movies, from all periods, in their entirety or in fragments.”
“I see Thai cinema as an art out of time … and a precious form of intangible heritage.”
Thai movies are widely derided by critics for failing to reach international standards. The term ‘nam nao’ (‘stinking water’) is often used to dismiss overly melodramatic soap operas and movies that feature overacting, overt villainy and extreme moral polarization, for examples.
But Herrera sees otherwise.
“I tend to believe that, instead of moving ‘backward’ in the history of cinematic techniques, this old Thai cinema became a significant horizon of cultural resistance,” she said, though she noted some were hired by the US government to dub propaganda films.
“I see [Thai cinema] as an art out of time … and a precious form of intangible heritage,” she said, naming off admired Thai filmmakers that include Thae Prakatwuthisan and Rattana Pestonji. “[They] endeavoured to make and produce movies with all their heart despite economic hardships.”
A promotional poster of “Money, Money, Money” (1965)
Herrera took five years to complete her research. During the time she visited some Thai actors, now in their 70s and 80s, to interview them in Thai.
One of her subjects, the comic actor and filmmaker Dokdin Kanyamarn, died earlier this year from heart failure at 94.
“[Dokdin] told me a lot about his first successes. Then he showed us a big swimming pool specially built in his garden to shoot underwater scenes and sang us lovely songs. He has a very melodious and dulcet voice.”
Dokdin Kanyamarn
Herrera also talked to Sombat Metanee, who once held the Guinness World Record for most film appearances and starred in 1966’s “Suek Bang Rajan” (The Battle of Bang Rajan) and “Chula Trikhun” (1967).
“[Sombat] remembers so many aspects of that period,” Herrera said of the 81-year-old actor. “He helped me understand the gentlemanliness proper to the heroes of old Thai movies. He is a genuine suphap burut.”
Herrera landed rare interviews not only with the heroes of Thai cinema, but its heroines as well. Among them was Thai-French Amara Asavanond or “Thailand’s Elizabeth Taylor,” who embodied the a particular kind of heroine in the 1950s – mysterious – especially in her role in “Hao Dong” in which Amara subrogates her father who is the most wanted thief.
A promotional poster of “Hao Dong” showing Amara Asavanond holding a gun in black suit featuring a cobra.
“Thanks to her, I could get the gist of these movies, which are considered lost today,” Herrera said.
But it’s probably her conversation with “Miss Honey Eyes” Petchara Chaowarat that Herrera says struck her the most. The 75-year-old actress went blind from spending so many hours exposed to bright set lights. She’s best known for co-starring in more than 100 movies with Mitr Chaibancha – the acting legend who died after falling from a helicopter in 1970 while filming the finale of what would be his last film. They became a koo kwan (heartthrob screen couple) and earned the nickname “Mitr-Petchara.”
“We talked together [for] six hours. Petchara was holding my hand and recounting anecdotes about the key moments of her career, especially her legendary collaboration with Mitr,” Herrera said.
Phetchara Chaowarat in her movie debut ‘The Love Diary of Pimchawee’, (1962, 16mm), with Mitr Chaibancha.
“I still feel extremely lucky when I think about these times,” Herrera said of her encounters with the Thai film greats.
As of this writing, Herrera is in France trying to organize a special screening of “Saen Rak” (1967) to be voiced live by two professional Thai performers.
Gov. Aswin Kwanmuang praised the public for recognizing the impact the festival has on the environment as only 44,883 styrofoam krathongs were recovered, about 1 percent less than last year.
