Thammasat University students are invited to watch an online film festival from Friday, 9 April to Sunday, 11 April 2021.
Its title is Nonflix – Limited And Less…Asia.
The festival will feature online and onsite screenings in Berlin, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City. As the festival’s Facebook page explains,
The festival seeks another mode of connecting, exchanging and getting into conversation through a journey of moving images. With 17 films by 11 artists, we take a closer look on Asia as the main focus: a complex encyclopaedia of cultures, politics and societies which are triggers of the topics in the movies of our programme. The films are set up into two parts available online for 24 hours each, followed by the online discussion “Pandemic Cinema” on the final day.
The films will be screened online via Website and the conversation will be held online on “zoom” for more information and registration follow here or check our website: https://www.nonberlin.com/nonflix/
The Thammasat University Library collection includes many books about different aspects of Asian film.
As the Non Berlin website observes,
NON Berlin intends to raise consciousness on modern times. By breaking away from Western-oriented theories and by collecting extensive discourses that cover Eastern, Western philosophy and art we pursue to make a balance of yin and yang, a symbol of harmony.
By introducing Asian philosophy and experimenting with art, we create a playful and communicative atmosphere where people can enjoy this whole process.
Berlin is an ideal place for NON as it has been the center of European culture in the past and modern times. Significant political events that happened in the past have also made Berlin a place which enables NON to look into the Asian identity from a more objective point of view.
The current stable economic status of Berlin and Germany has enabled the city to re-emerge as the capital of European culture and arts, therefore, becoming the perfect area for NON Berlin to build networks, connect with people and practice our philosophy.
NON Berlin is in opposition to quantitative or comparative growth.
We prefer to progress slow and steadily with a careful and sincere approach to issues that need attention.
NON Berlin will proceed with network and archive building in the contemporary art scene with an aim to present a constructive vision to the future generation.
NON is a project space founded by video artist Chan Sook Choi and architect Ido Shin. As Koreans living in Berlin since 2001, since the very beginning they have been interested in seeking a kind of universal identity spanning the various backgrounds of Berlin based contemporary artists in order to examine the question of identity as it is often perceived from the outside; according to gender, nationality and cultural milieu.
To this end they created NON Berlin – Asia Contemporary Art Platform – in 2014. Two ideas are the mainstay of this:
Firstly, ‘NON’ means ‘to discuss’ in Chinese. Thus, NON Berlin opens up a platform for discussing the dichotomy between ‘East and West’ and ‘Asia and Europe’ and initiates ‘face to face’ meetings, facilitating exchange, discourse and networking. Secondly, and somewhat paradoxically, NON Berlin serves as a negation, ‘not Berlin’, although the project space – a draw for artists and producers from the independent cultural scenes of the world – is situated in Berlin’s centre. NON Berlin is not limited to a particular artistic scene or cultural identity. Instead, it presents projects that seek new interdisciplinary perspectives in order to create an intermediary zone for re-evaluating existing categories.
Nomads from multiple or dynamic locations, and mostly stemming from multicultural backgrounds, possess a sensibility for current topics, transformations and fractures via their positioning as contemporary artists…
Among the short experimental films on view will be those on themes such as esthetics, ethics, memory, history, migration, globalism, external and internal colonization, domestic problems, racism, intimacy, and gender issues.
The festival will feature three films by the Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke.
As an online biography states,
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke is a Thai filmmaker of Teochew-Hainanese descent, born, brought up and based in Bangkok. He graduated from the film department of Chulalongkorn University. He works full-time as a scriptwriter for a studio, writing commercial features and television series. He also works as a film lecturer and critic. In 2020, Ratchapoom was selected to participate in the Berlinale Talents program.
As he told an interviewer last year, his decision to become a filmmaker was a
long story. My father is a film buff, though he isn’t a hardcore cinephile in a way like screening Godard or Antonioni to his kids. He’s more into American award-winning film, AKA Oscar. He introduced many lesser-known films to my attention when I was only watching cartoons and films kids my age tended to watch. As normally, back then, surrounding people tended to focus only on the cast of the film, my dad pointed to the importance of the maker behind the film, the director. Names like Tarantino, Coen Brothers, Scorsese, Coppola, Kurosawa, etc. were normalized in his conversation, though by that time I still didn’t want to be a filmmaker, I just liked watching films. There was one time he went to see Harmony Korine’s Gummo (I’m not sure if it’s this one or some small American indie that occasionally got released here), and came back to tell me how strange the film was. He usually bought 4-5 film magazines monthly. I grew up reading those magazines and some of them had a section where they translated reviews from foreign magazines and it was full of films I didn’t know or weren’t even released in Thailand like Sokurov’s Russian Ark, or Mullan’s Golden Lion-winning The Magdalene Sisters. At the same time, my aspiration to be a writer grew stronger. Filmmaking seemed to me a bit impossible. Writing a book is more plausible. My mom once said that writers were someone who read a lot. So, I started reading lots of literature, fictional works when I was in high school. However, it took time to finish one book, so I slightly shifted to the other narrative medium which was film. Before that, I was afraid of ‘difficult’ films. Yet I believed that to be a filmmaker, you had to be well-versed in your field. So, I kept watching for more and more, strange, obscure, difficult films. Slowly I became deeply involved and fascinated with the medium.
When he became interested in film, he explained, he looked for copies of
arthouse films in illegal DVD shops. When I discovered the shop, I mainly bought Ghibli anime because there was no official DVD in Thailand back then. Haha. Then I was interested in watching more obscure films, the films I kept finding while reading film magazines. I think it was Kieslowski’s Blue that was really paradigm-shifting to me. I was completely confused at the end of the film that I needed to look for the analysis on the internet which made me realize how cinema could convey something so profound, so abstract. Cinema could do many things other than simply telling a story to entertain. After that I have more cinematic adventures aside from illegal DVD shops, I attended screenings in culture institutes like Goethe, Alliance Francaise, public library, etc. I discovered many filmmakers that I later regarded as my godfather, godmother like Werner Schroter, Jacques Rivette, Marco Ferreri, Otar Iosselliani, Manoel de Oliveira, Nagisa Oshima, Shuji Terayama, Ulrike Ottinger, Chantal Akerman, Alexander Kluge etc. These filmmakers helped make me realize the potential of cinema.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)