Short film fest goes long

Think of it as a short-film gift that keeps giving – “Norte, the End of History”, a four-hour look at crime, punishment and injustice in the Philippines – is among the highlights of the 18th Thai Short Film and Video Festival, starting next week at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre.
A nominee for the Golden Palm at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and winner of the best director award at the Cinemanila festival, “Norte” centres on three characters – a struggling family
 man who is framed for murder and sent to prison, the man’s wife, left behind alone to pick up the pieces, and the real killer, whose disillusionment with society is pushing him to the edge of sanity. “Norte” producer Moira Lang will be among the festival guests.
Shorter offerings are among the
 highlights of a new French Connection programme.
“Too many good French films were submitted this year, so we decided to select some of them for a special programme,” says Sanchai Chotirosseranee, a festival programmer and deputy director of the Thai Film Archive, which organises the fest.
Among French offerings will be “Cambodia 2099”, by young French-Cambodian director Davy Chou, who previously surveyed Cambodia’s lost cinematic golden age in “Golden Slumbers”. He’ll also be a festival guest and will judge the international short-film competition. Selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes this year, the 20-minute film has three friends gathering on Phnom Penh’s Koh Pich, aka Diamond Island, talking about their dreams and what Cambodia will be like at the end of this century.
Other French Connections will include “Au sol” by Alexis Michalik, the animated shorts “Bigmundial” and “Bigeety” by Maurice Huvelin, “Le Premier pas” by Aurelien Laplace and “On s’y met” by Benjamin Busnel.
Still more French connections come from the Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Festival, the world’s largest short-film showcase. As the Thai Short Film and Video Festival has done for the past several years, there will be special package of the Best of Clermont Ferrand. This year’s programme will have five films, among them “La Lampe au beurre de yak”, which won the grand prix. Directed by China’s Wei Hu, it has a young itinerant photographer and his assistant trying to photograph Tibetan nomads in front of various backdrops.
Six of Southeast Asia’s top filmmakers join for one film, “Letters from the South”, each taking a segment to look at the Chinese diaspora in the region. The directors are Thailand’s Aditya Assarat, Singapore’s Royston Tan and Sun Koh, Myanmar’s Midi Zhao and Malaysia’s Tan Chui Mui and Tsai Ming-liang.
And more views from across the region can be seen in the S-Express programme curated by film experts from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.
And, in celebration of the Film Archive’s 30th anniversary, there will be two special programmes from the Archive’s collection as well as the annual Queer shorts collection of Thai and foreign films.
As always, the centrepiece of the Thai Short Film and Video Festival is the competition among Thai indie filmmakers for the top-prize RD Pestonji Award, named in honour of the country’s pioneering auteur, along with documentaries, animated shorts and student films vying for other awards.