Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Cinema
Thailand has a lively homespun movie industry and produces nearly 50 comedies, dramas
and horror films every year. Cinema is possibly the country's most significant contempor-
ary cultural export, and several Thai films of the last two decades have emerged as interna-
tional film festival darlings.
Bangkok Film launched Thailand's film industry with the first Thai-directed silent
movie, Chok Sorng Chan, in 1927. Silent films proved to be more popular than talkies right
into the 1960s, and as late as 1969 Thai studios were still producing them from 16mm
stock. Perhaps partially influenced by India's famed masala movies - which enjoyed a
strong following in post-WWII Bangkok - film companies blended romance, comedy, me-
lodrama and adventure to give Thai audiences a little bit of everything.
The Thai movie industry almost died during the '80s and '90s, swamped by Hollywood
extravaganzas and the boom era's taste for anything imported. From a 1970s peak of about
200 releases per year, the Thai output shrank to an average of only 10 films a year by 1997.
The Southeast Asian economic crisis that year threatened to further bludgeon the ailing in-
dustry, but the lack of funding coupled with foreign competition brought about a new em-
phasis on quality rather than quantity. The current era boasts a new generation of seriously
good Thai directors, several of whom studied film abroad during Thailand's '80s and early
'90s boom period. Thai and foreign critics alike speak of a current Thai 'new wave', who,
avoiding the soap operatics of the past, favour gritty realism, artistic innovation and a
strengthened Thai identity.
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