Bangkok-born, U.S.-educated Aditya Assarat’s Wonderful Town is his fourth film and first feature, and although it frequently feels like the work of someone else—say, fellow Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul—it is an absorbing, powerful achievement. Quiet, moody, semi-lyrical, suspenseful, it is set in Takua Pa, a near ghost town in southern coastal Thailand; deaths and abandonments […]
Daily Archives: March 3, 2009
After a decade spent making films in Eastern Europe, Joris Ivens went to Paris; La Seine a rencontré Paris won at Cannes. His East German Song of the Rivers (Das Lied der Ströme, 1954), with music by Shostakovich and lyrics by Brecht, composed a hymn to labor and international workers’ solidarity along six rivers worldwide, […]