THAI FILM FOLLIES CONTINUE

The film market at the Bangkok International Film Festival is of to a roaring start...oh, wait a minute, I lied. As of Tuesday, the first full day of the market, many of the exhibitor booths remained empty and by Tuesday afternoon many of the buyers and sellers had left the market and were off sightseeing. Shochiku and Toshiba looked to have skipped the festival this year, and according to Variety, the constant refrain was "Where are the buyers?" Malaysia and Thailand had a strong presence at the market but European buyers were few and far between.

However, in an attempt to keep things interesting, Sahamongkol films, the company owned by the ex-head of Federation of the National Film Association, Somsak Techratanaprasert, who stepped down over the controversy to date involving the festival, has not only continued its lone boycott of the Bangkok Festival, but they've also dropped WATER because it broke their boycott. Sahamongkol had acquired the rights to distribute Deepa Mehta's hugely successful WATER in Thailand, but they pulled all of their films from the Bangkok Festival line-up as part of their boycott, including WATER. However, Deepa Mehta had retained control of WATER's festival rights and she went ahead and screened it at the Festival anyways. Sahamongkol then dropped WATER, giving back the local license to Celluloid Dreams as a way of protesting Mehta's lack of protest.

This was a very silly thing for Sahamongkol to do. WATER faced enormous violence when it was being made, and then went on to play at the Toronto Film Festival, to be picked up by Fox Searchlight and to earn over US$2 million at the Canadian box office, no small feat for a subtitled film that was originally released on just 33 screens. Its US release will be in Spring 2006.

(Read a review of WATER.)