These are ten films you shouldn’t miss at the Luang Prabang Film Festival which will take place online from December 4th – 10th, 2020 *Films available for Southeast Asia*

Important note: Links to watch the films will be available on the festival’s website from December 4th, 2020.

Recommended Films:

It’s hard not to wonder if Rae Red wasn’t thinking of Jean-Luc Godard, who famously said, “all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” when she began writing the film. In her first feature, Red comes out strong with a scenario too many women have imagined, no doubt, after enduring catcalls and asinine remarks in the workplace. Enter the gun. It certainly changes the way the conversation unfolds. Be ready for a stunning performance by Janine Gutierrez.

Availability: From December 4th – 10th in Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar

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Burma Storybook is a creative documentary that uses Burmese poetry to tell the story of a country emerging from years of dictatorship. The film circles around the life story of the country’s most famous living dissident poet as he waits for his long-lost son to return home.

Availability: Only on December 5th, 2020 (Saturday) in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.

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One of the most popular films in the Philippines in 2019 is this coming of age anthology, which follows a group of high school classroom “cleaners.” As they tidy up, they discover the world is anything but clean. Emerging Director Glenn Barit says the art design for his first feature was inspired by high school textbooks, highlighters, and pens. The bright and fluorescent colors take us on a nostalgic journey to a time before the internet dominated the modern classroom. Barit describes the photocopied look he chose for the film, which they achieved by months of manually highlighting each frame, as symbolic of the repetitive products of a machine.

Availability: From December 4th – 10th in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.

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Based on true events that occurred in his own hometown, Director Arden Rod Condez brings us a film that warns against the power of technology and social media. Condez tells the tale of grade 8 student John Denver Cabungcal, who is accused at school of stealing an iPad. John Denver’s attempts to defend himself against these allegations are complicated by the tools of modern times when his actions are recorded and posted online for all to judge. This judgment comes swiftly for John, who sees his entire life transformed in a week of school days.

Availability: From December 4th – 10th in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.

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Resort towns in general are places where reality blends with fantasy, and where the magical coexists with the mundane. The Thai island of Krabi serves, therefore, as the perfect backdrop for this experimental film by accomplished filmmakers Suwichakornpong and Rivers, who use non-actors to create a sense of documented reality. The normal events occur alongside the definitely strange, delivering each supernatural element as if nothing particularly odd were happening and charming the viewer into a comfortable place within the surreal.

Availability: From December 4th – 10th in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines.

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“Mekong 2030” is an omnibus film that brings different cultures and nations together to reflect on a problem in common: the degradation of the Mekong River. Five directors from the Mekong region countries were tasked with imagining what their homes might look like ten years in the future. The result is a journey though place, time, and the human, environmental, and spiritual worlds.

Availability: From December 4th – 10th in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.

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Sonya leads a lonely, predictable existence tending to her ailing father and their mortuary business. Her life seems relentlessly dull until one day a woman’s body is delivered, and her perspective begins to change. When no one appears to claim the body, Sonya becomes sympathetically attached to the lost corpse, and an unusual bond begins to form between the physically dead and emotionally dying. This is the third film from acclaimed Director Dwein Baltazar and a beautifully tender one at that.

Availability: From December 4th – 10th in Laos.

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Ròm is a boy with a talent for numbers, but like everyone else in this film, he doesn’t have much luck. He is relentlessly optimistic, however, believing in the signs and running lottery numbers for those who trust his ad hoc visions. His clients, a group of neighbours in a housing complex facing eviction and Ròm, in need of money so he can leave town to look for his lost parents, are desperate for a win. Everything for everyone is on the line. First time Director Tran Thanh Huy pushes this fact home with unstoppable pacing, driving the main character through back alleys and the traffic of highway overpasses.

Availability: From December 5th – 6th in Laos.

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“The Long Walk” is about a stretch of road connecting the past with the present and the dead with the living. A boy suffers a pair of traumatic experiences, in witnessing the death of a young woman in a car crash and confronting the passing of his own mother, and grows to be a withdrawn and troubled man. As in other of Do’s films, the dead haven’t really departed; in this case, they may even promise to help a broken man revisit the past and repair his path.

Availability: From December 4th – 10th in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam.

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A filmmaker arrives on Mars in the year 2045 and finds himself incapable of making a film about a place he has not lived in, or rather, where he has not been able to develop memories. Instead, he finds himself working with the footage he brought with him from earth, though his memories from there have faded on his long space journey. He blends what he has carried, footage of the Ruc people of Vietnam, who live deep in caves and in their memories, alongside footage from the American war with recordings he has gathered from deep space, resulting in an existential examination of home.

Availability: From December 4th – 10th in Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam.

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For more information about the festival and the programme please visit the official website here: https://www.lpfilmfest.org/