The common touch

A cousin’s wedding video and a profile of a Muslim family that raises pigs were the winning entries of the Asean competition of the Salaya International Documentary Film Festival last week.
“Before the Wedlock House” by Singapore’s Liao Jiekai won in the short documentary category. With his cousin getting married, the maker of the 2010 feature “Red Dragonflies” agreed to make a short film of the wedding as his gift to her.
The resulting video, shot in black and white, captures the bride sitting on the edge of her bed in her wedding dress. She’s in her room at her parents’ house, waiting for her groom to come take her away.
Shooting the 15-minute film was spontaneous, Liao said at last Sunday’s awards ceremony at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. However, it took him a year to get around to editing it because it was so personal.
Salaya Doc’s feature documentary prize went to “Denok and Gareng” by Indonesia’s Dwi Sujanti Nugraheni. It’s about a young Muslim couple who make a controversial choice for a livelihood – they raise pigs in a country where pork consumption is largely taboo because of their religion. While trying to stay on the straight and narrow and be responsible, the former denizens of the street face daily struggles as they pick through trash piles for scraps to feed their pigs.
Their extended family includes Gareng’s mother and his brothers, one of whom is involved in one scrape after another, adding to everyone’s burden.
Among the jurors of this year’s competition was Panarai Ostapirat, an anthropology and sociology lecturer at Thammasat University. She said she had a hard time choosing the best of the entries and was particularly struck by how they were all about “common” people.
Other jurors this year were Singaporean film-festival programmer Philip Cheah and Thai documentary filmmaker Panu Aree.
In all, 73 entries were submitted. The other finalists were “Durga” from Singapore, “The Hills are Alive” from Indonesia, “Overlay” and “Saleng” (“Recycle Trishaw”) from Thailand,, “Tondo, Beloved: To What Are the Poor Born?” from the Philippines, “Where I Go” from Cambodia and and “With or Without Me” from Vietnam.

OVER THE BORDER

Salaya Doc’s opening film was “Boundary” (“Fahtum Pandinsoong”), which dealt with the controversial subject of the disputed border area around Cambodia’s Preah Vihear temple. It’s a hot topic made even hotter by the International Court of Justice holding hearings about it next week.
On the Thai side, director Nontawat Numbenchapol found that most residents had benefittedfrom tourism in the area. They were upset with the hostilities at the border and didn’t like being dragged into the dispute by the nationalist yellow shirts.
But on the Cambodian side, the Bangkok native had to tread lightly, because folks over there generally distrust Thais. Not wanting to be captured as a spy and jailed as a pair of yellow-shirt activists had, Nontawat posed as a Chinese-American student as he conducted interviews.
He also visited the temple itself, approaching it from the Cambodian side, on a new road that winds its way up the steep slopes of the Dangrek Mountains.