Children of the cinema : From sombre and literal to playful and absurd, 10 Thai shorts for kids will be shown this Sunday

Children of the cinema : From sombre and literal to playful and absurd, 10 Thai shorts for kids will be shown this Sunday.

KONG RITHDEE

Maybe the challenges in making a movie for children are how to broaden their imagination and how not to insult their intelligence. Children's films need not be dumb, because kids are not. They can be comical, illogical, farcical, even crazy and a tad radical, but they should never be stupid. A really good children's film is, supposedly, one that has been conceived as if for adults - a recent gem is the Japanese film Nobody Knows - though that is sadly a rarity in the local movie and television arenas.

All parents realise that children know how to watch a movie long before they know how to read (and they keep watching Shrek 2 or Madagascar for the 17th time). Their cerebral mechanisms seem to have been pre-programmed to understand the physical flow of narratives and the personalities of colourful characters before they, in the most abstract task devised by civilised society, begin to associate meanings with words. Despite this fact, few attempts have been invested, especially in Thailand, to use television and movies to foster a child's early development.

There are a few fine models. The Berlin International Film Festival, held in the German capital in February, features the "Kinderfilmfest" section catering specially to schoolchildren. The programme shows not only bright-coloured cartoons, but also adventure and drama stories; in a sub-section called 14Plus, sometimes there are films dealing with potentially tough subjects like sexual awakening and divorce. A jury panel, all kids, gives out awards to films that most impressed them. (The Thai film Dorm, which narrates the growing pains of a boy stuck in a haunted boarding school, has recently been invited to the Kinderfilmfest competition 2007.)

In January 2006, the Thai Film Foundation borrowed the Berlin model and organised the Children's Film Festival at the auditorium in Lumphini Park. Receving a fair amount of publicity, this small cinefest, which took place around Children's Day, featured Thai and international movies with children-oriented stories, and with free admission. Unfortunately support was in too short a supply for them to carry on.

But we're not witnessing a cheerless drought. This year the Central Office of Health Promotion (chief crusader in the anti-smoking war) has taken it upon themselves to host a movie event for Children's Day. The agency has commissioned 10 filmmakers to create an ensemble of short features, each 15 to 25 minutes, and all are scheduled to hit the screen at Lido Sunday afternoon before going on tour at schools in many cities.

Each title sets out to speak to children, and each director picks a disparate means in getting their points across, from sombre to playful, from the discreetly dark to the absurdly hilarious. A few familiar names pop up in the list of filmmakers - Aditya Assarat, Taweewat Wanta, Pimpaka Towira - and their offerings contribute to the multi-flavours of this vice-free medley.

As to be expected, the themes favoured by several directors are friendship. The approaches range from literal directness in the animation Baby Mind, by Primprapa Wangpichayasuk and Pliew Sirisuwan, which narrates the simple tale of a beggar-boy and his beggar-puppy, to the gallantly experimental as in Chao Chai Noi Noi, or The Little Princes, by Tosaporn Mongkol.

By punctuating straightforward storytelling with a surrealist's arabesque reverie of traditional likay dance, Tosaporn shows confidence in his young audience; he believes they possess the intelligence to understand the unusual stylistic hybrid. His story is a little too familiar - a provincial boy moaning for his absent mother and befriending his former bullies - but it's his unconventional modus operandi that gives the short a zing.

Another motherless child strikes an unlikely bond with a gaudily made-up transvestite in Dek Long, or The Lost Girl, by the flamboyant Tanwarin Sukapisit. Tanwarin, maker of several gender-bending shorts, plays a frustrated ladyboy who reluctantly agrees to take a lost girl back to her home in Pattaya. This candid melodrama has its appeal, and at the end we're not sure if the title refers to the little lost girl or the Tanwarin character.

Capturing a sense of petty rivalry which often induces accidental friendship between schoolboys is Puen-Yak, a well-composed 20-minute movie by Manuss Worasing. But the short that takes us outside the school grounds to roam the paranoid streets of Bangkok - it is also, incidentally, timely following the current bomb scare - is Pimpaka Towira's Taxi the Hero. A middle-aged Thai man, who looks vaguely Indian or Middle-Eastern, hires a cab to take him and a little girl, we're not sure of her relation to the man, to tour strategic sites around the capital, including the Defense Ministry. It's not too hard to guess that nothing bad is going to happen, and at the end this is another case of misunderstanding and preconceptions, yet it's interesting to see how young children will respond to the political subtext of the story.

The response to Taweewat Wanta's Hua Nar, or The Ringleader, will be nothing but resounding laughter. Taweewat, whose first feature is the zombie horror-comedy Sars Wars and whose next film is called Sperm, injects shots of irreverent humour and cartoonish violence into the story of a fat-boy gang-leader who faces the threat from a one-eyed schoolgirl and a retarded teenager with a pink knapsack who "just returned from fighting a war at the border". Again, the message of friendship is eventually achieved after several bouts of slapstick mischief that include fart jokes and turd gags.

Certainly the most enigmatic section in the ensemble is The Sigh, by Aditya Assarat. Partly a ghost story and partly an ironic lament on Thailand's lost cinema treasures, the short features not a single child or any obvious children-related subjects either. The movie is made as if for grown-ups - and sometimes that's the best way to make a children's movie.

Screenings of children's films will take place at Lido theatre, Siam Square, on Jan 14, from 11am to 4pm. Directors and actors from the films will be there to meet the audience. Free admission. Call 02-251-1265 for details.

Bangkok Post
Friday January 12, 2007