Latest news with #Critics'Week
Korea Herald
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
Cannes-selected Korean animated short heads to theaters
Megabox to screen Joung Yu-mi's 'Glasses' along with earlier work in rare commercial run Multiplex chain Megabox will screen director Joung Yu-mi's animated short "Glasses" in theaters starting June 11, following its selection for the 78th Cannes Film Festival, the company announced Thursday. Competing in the Critics' Week short film section, the 15-minute animation was one of only two Korean works at this year's Cannes. No Korean films appeared in the main competition or other official sections, the first such absence in 12 years. "Glasses" centers on a woman who begins seeing shadowy visions of herself during an eye examination. The silent animation, rendered in expressive black-and-white pencil strokes, explores the themes of identity and perception. The screening will also feature Joung's earlier short "Paranoid Kid," previously shown at the Zagreb International Animation Festival. Based on the director's own picture book, the film is narrated by actress Bae Doo-na. 'Short films rarely find space outside the festival circuit, so I'm grateful for this chance to share my work in theaters,' Joung said.
Daily Tribune
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Tribune
Chechen film, Assange documentary win prizes in Cannes
The first Chechen film to screen at the Cannes Festival won best documentary, while a film about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange picked up a special prize on Friday. Deni Oumar Pitsaev won the festival's Golden Eye award for his autobiographical documentary Imago, which follows the filmmaker after he inherits a small patch of land in the Pankisi valley in Georgia, across the border from Chechnya in southern Russia. During the two Chechen wars of 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, the region became a refuge for Chechen rebels and thousands of civilian refugees who crossed Georgia's porous mountain border to flee the conflict. Pitsaev — who grew up between Grozny, Saint Petersburg and Almaty, and is now based between Brussels and Paris — was also awarded a prize in the festival's Critics' Week section on Wednesday. US director Eugene Jarecki was awarded a special jury prize for his documentary The Six Billion Dollar Man, about Assange, who has been in Cannes to promote the film but has not yet spoken publicly. Assange has declined all interview requests, but the 53-year-old former hacker's wife, Stella Assange, said he had 'recovered' from his years in detention and would 'speak when he's ready.' Assange was released from a high-security British prison in June last year after a plea bargain with the US government over WikiLeaks's work publishing top-secret military and diplomatic information. He spent five years behind bars fighting extradition from Britain and another seven holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London, where he claimed political asylum.
RTÉ News
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Chechen film, Assange documentary win prizes in Cannes
The first Chechen film to screen at the Cannes Festival has won Best Documentary while a film about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has picked up a special prize. Déni Oumar Pitsaev won the festival's Golden Eye award for his autobiographical documentary Imago, which follows the filmmaker after he inherits a small patch of land in the Pankisi valley in Georgia, across the border from Chechnya in southern Russia. During the two Chechen wars of 1994-1996 and 1999-2009, the region became a refuge for Chechen rebels and thousands of civilian refugees who crossed Georgia's porous mountain border to flee the conflict. Pitsaev - who grew up between Grozny, Saint Petersburg, and Almaty, and is now based between Brussels and Paris - was also awarded a prize in the festival's Critics' Week section on Wednesday. The American director Eugene Jarecki was awarded a Special Jury Prize for his documentary The Six Billion Dollar Man, about Assange, who has been in Cannes to promote the film but has not yet spoken publicly. Assange has declined all interview requests, but the 53-year-old former hacker's wife, Stella Assange, said he had "recovered" from his years in detention and would "speak when he's ready". Assange was released from a high-security British prison in June last year after a plea bargain with the US government over WikiLeaks's work publishing top-secret military and diplomatic information. He spent five years behind bars fighting extradition from Britain and another seven in Ecuador's embassy in London, where he claimed political asylum. Jarecki said his film aimed to correct the record about Assange, whose methods and personality make him a divisive figure. "I think Julian Assange put himself in harm's way for the principle of informing the public about what corporations and governments around the world are doing in secret," he said.
Straits Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Thai film A Useful Ghost wins Cannes Critics' Week top prize
Comedy-fantasy A Useful Ghost, made with Singapore participation, has won the grand prize at the 2025 Critics' Week sidebar of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. PHOTO: MOMO FILM CO Thai-language comedy-fantasy A Useful Ghost has won the top prize of the Grand Prix in Critics' Week, an independent sidebar of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Directed by Thai film-maker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke making his feature debut, it follows March (played by Thai actor Witsarut Himmarat), who is grieving the death of his wife Nat (Thai actress Davika Hoorne). After her reincarnation as a vacuum cleaner, they rekindle their relationship. The film is produced by companies from Thailand, France and Germany. Singapore-based Momo Film Co is also a co-producer, with support from the Infocomm Media Development Authority's (IMDA) Singapore Film Commission (SFC). The Cannes Film Festival, held in France, opened on May 13 and will end May 24. Ms Tan Si En, founder and producer at Momo Film Co, says her team is deeply honoured by the recognition A Useful Ghost has received at Cannes' Critics' Week. 'This award is a celebration of the creative synergy between Singapore and our international partners. It shows the power that South-east Asian stories have to resonate globally. Our mission has always been to champion new voices and perspectives from the region, and this win affirms our collaborative approach,' she says in a press statement. In 2023, Malay-language horror film Tiger Stripes (2023), the debut effort by Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu, won the Grand Prix at Cannes' Critics' Week, marking the first time that a film from South-east Asia had won the prize. Tiger Stripes is co-produced by firms from Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan and Singapore. Singapore-based Akanga Film Asia co-produced it, with support from the SFC. Other made-with-Singapore projects at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival include the drama Renoir, directed by Japanese film-maker Chie Hayakawa and co-produced by Akanga Film Asia. The Japanese-language film will compete for the top festival prize of the Palme d'Or. Before The Sea Forgets, a short film by Vietnamese film-maker Le Ngoc Duy, was also selected to screen at the independent sidebar event Directors' Fortnight. Singapore-based production houses 13 Little Pictures and WBSB Films are co-producers. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘A Useful Ghost' Review: Dead Spirits Inhabit the Appliances of Their Living Loved Ones in a Delightfully Absurd Thai Sex Comedy
Unlike the logic-defying supernatural phenomena that drive its plot forward, Thai feature A Useful Ghost (Phi Chidi Kha) should not work, with its jarring shifts in tone and cray-cray mix of genres — and yet it does. Writer-director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's feature debut, which premiered in the Critics' Week sidebar at Cannes, writes its own rule book. It starts off farcically with household and industrial appliances possessed by dead spirits seeking their still-living loved ones; morphs into nesting sets of surprisingly sincere love stories, some of them lustily queer; and ends with the dawn of a violent class war spanning both spiritual and earthly planes. Boonbunchachoke's skillful toggling between comedy, melodrama and polemic helped to spark interest on the Croisette where camp Thai content goes over well. A long afterlife on the festival circuit awaits. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'The Disappearance of Josef Mengele' Review: An Artfully Directed, Intellectually Vacuous Holocaust-Ploitation Flick Feinberg on Cannes: Oscar Contenders Emerging From First Half Include 'Nouvelle Vague' and Jennifer Lawrence for 'Die, My Love' 'A Magnificent Life' Review: Sylvain Chomet's Beautifully Animated but Clumsily Scripted Love Letter to Marcel Pagnol For all its playfulness, there's an intellectual heft to A Useful Ghost that exerts its own gravity. It's no surprise that in the film's press notes Boonbunchachoke's bio reveals that, in addition to making his own shorts and writing for commercials and television in Thailand, he also teaches film theory and writes film criticism. That makes it tempting to see 'Academic Ladyboy' (Wisarut Homhuan), the first character we get to know, with his apartment full of books and fascination with stories, as a version of the director himself. Turns out he owns a fragment of a municipal bas-relief panel that features in a digressive opening prologue. The panel depicts iconic Thai types — Buddhist monks, soldiers, farmers and so on — and gets taken down to make room for a new shopping mall, a narrative trajectory that echoes the discourse throughout about the erasure of history and the fragility of memory. Academic Ladyboy (that's also his name in the credits) is the auditor to whom the stories within the film's story are told after he calls a technical support line to complain about his new vacuum cleaner audibly coughing in a very human way through the night. Practically moments later, eerily beautiful bleach-blond repairman Krong (Wanlop Rungkumjad) shows up on Ladyboy's door to examine the appliance. Krong is not surprised that the vacuum is possessed as it's a recurrent fault of products from the factory that made it. To explain, he tells the interconnected stories of two ghosts with deep connections to the plant. The first ghost is the spirit of a worker named Tok (Krittin Thongmai), who dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances and then takes up residence in the facility's dust extractors, air conditioners and vacuums that are made there. In the story's world, ghosts come back because they have unfinished business, but also because someone living remembers them well enough to keep them around. Later, it will be revealed that Tok's male lover Pin (Wachara Kanha) is still pining for his beloved. When no one else is around Pin and Tok — in human form, not machine — will have vigorous shagging sessions. Meanwhile, another ghost and her still-breathing object of affection take the story's central stage. March (Wisarut Himmarat) deeply mourns his late wife Nat (a regal Davika Hoorne). As the son of the factory's female owner Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), March often visits the premises, so he's alarmed to see Nat's ghost, wearing a very striking sapphire-blue silk dress with massive Claude Montana-style sculptural shoulders, walking among the production lines. He chases her down but she's moved into a new vacuum, a fetchingly designed product that seems to be bowing forward in supplication to its owner and comes with a handle embedded with LED lights to reveal what the vacuum is feeling. For instance, when March and Nat-in-vacuum-form make out in hospital, the lights glow red and pink, but turn blue when she's just scooting around hallways. Those looking on at the lovers see March and the vacuum, the suction end standing in for Nat's head, logically enough. But for March, he sees his wife, always in her starched, oddly formal blue dress. (Phim Umari's costumes are striking throughout.) Although Suman and March's many paternal aunts and uncles disapprove of his current relationship with his dead spouse — most of them having disdained her as an unworthy match when she was alive — she soon finds a way to court the living's favor. Using some kind of psychic power, she enters the dreams of people haunted by ghosts and unpicks why they won't leave the living alone, which is where her story intersects with that of Pin and Tok. Unfortunately, sinister governmental minister Dr. Paul (Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit) employs Nat to take her skill further in order to wipe out people's memories of the 2010 political uprising in Thailand, assisted by the use of electro-shock therapy. The ghosts realize that their living loved ones have been compelled to forget them because the ghosts' bodies start to become translucent, creating a sense of urgency that heats up the film as it enters its last act. The stakes are high even for Ishmael-like narrator Krong, whose true nature is finally revealed, a disclosure unlikely to surprise anyone — although it's a bit of shock for poor Ladyboy, left at a crucial comic moment with his legs in the air in the middle of a bout of coitus. But that's typical of the surprising, often delightful way Boonbunchachoke bounces between comic and tragic registers, deftly interspersing bawdy low comedy with elegiac meditations on politics and history. Although the references to the 2010 uprising will be less resonant to non-Thai audiences — just as they're less likely to catch the plot's reference to the Thai legend of Mae Nak, who has featured in many films and TV shows — the themes of grief and memory are universal enough to give this legs for export. 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