Archive - 12th Five Flavours Film Festival
Samui Song
Awards and festivals
Film description
The 30-year-old Viyada, a popular TV actress, specializes in playing villains. Her private life also seems to be turning into a plot of a film – she is stuck in an ice-cold marriage with a wealthy foreigner, a wanna-be sculptor increasingly drawn to a religious movement led by a strict guru. The woman is forced to take drastic measures to free herself from her oppressive condition.
The brilliant, thrilling narration leads the audiences into a psychological drama with a Freudian twist. The cold, atmospheric cinematography is contrasted with the latent entanglement of flaring emotions, which eventually have to burst out. The director admits to being inspired by Hitchcock, but his tale of dark sexuality, the masks w put on even in very close relationships, and the institutions feeding off of spiritual explorations, is universal and contemporary. The ironic film noir turns into a social critique, applicable not only to Thailand.
Jagoda Murczyńska
Pen-ek Ratanaruang
Born in 1962 in Bangkok, graduated from the department of Art History at the New York Pratt Institute, where he studied between 1977 and 1985. He started off as a freelance illustrator and designer. In 1993, he began working for Film Factory in Bangkok, where he met Wisit Sasanatieng. Both directors are currently considered as the most prominent filmmakers of the Thai New Wave. In Film Factory, Pen-ek shot a few successful, award-winning commercials. A few years later he made his feature debut, "Fun Bar Karaoke," which premiered at Berlinale IFF. In the 2000s, the director was involved in a series of pan-Asian productions, working with filmmakers from Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Recently, he has been dividing his time between collaborations and his auteur projects.
1997 Fun Bar Karaoke
1999 69 / 6ixtynin9 / Ruang Talok 69
2001 Monrak Transistor
2003 Ostatnie życie we wszechświecie / Last Life in the Universe / Ruang Rak Noi Nid Mahasan
2006 Niewidzialne fale / Invisible Waves
2007 Ploy
2009 Nymph / Nang mai
2011 Headshot: Mroczna karma / Headshot
2014 The Life of Gravity / Raeng dueng dood
2017 Samui Song
