The Luang Prabang Film Festival (LPFF) will be back in a big way in 2022; from 8-11 December, some twenty film screenings, public discussions and Q&A sessions will be held in venues around Luang Prabang; at night, two different outdoor cinema venues will screen Lao and Thai films for local audiences.
Up until a few months ago, the thought of bringing the LPFF back was still up in the air; however, the COVID lull generated demand for a full return from local government, hospitality providers, and film buffs from around the world.
Sean Chadwell, LPFF’s executive director, exerted an immense effort to raise funds to finally get this year’s LPFF off the ground, now that Laos has reopened its borders. We asked him how the LPFF is bouncing back, and how Mekong Subregion filmmakers are claiming cinema in the region as their own.
You’re coming back after a long hiatus; what should we be expecting for this December’s LPFF?
We will be live and international for the first time since 2017, actually. This is our first big event in five years, and it’s going to feel, to those who have been, like a classic LPFF experience. We’ll have between 20 and 24 feature films. Our selection has always been exclusive to the ten countries of Southeast Asia. So we only program from those countries.
Everything is always free for our audiences as well, and that’s going to be true this year. We’ll have a giant outdoor screen with 800 seats set up at night. We show primarily Lao and Thai movies, and we generally see between 1,200-1,500 people at those films – standing, sitting on the walls, watching from their motorbikes out in the street.
What happens in Luang Prabang during the festival is kind of magical. You’ve got the entire population of the region who normally doesn’t get to see a movie on anything bigger than a TV screen, and usually it’s watching on a cell phone. Suddenly they’ve got a screen that’s eight meters wide and a bright projector, and they’re watching contemporary movies, the way movies were designed to be shown.
What other factors make Luang Prabang so suitable as a film festival venue?
It does feel like an odd choice, to be totally honest. You know, there is not an operating cinema in Luang Prabang. In fact, in most of northern Laos there are no movie theaters. So we have a town without a cinema hosting a big, international film festival. We’re the only festival under those conditions that I’m aware of.
Also, we learned very early on that filmmakers really appreciate the experience of coming to Luang Prabang. Our festival is usually just after the Singapore International Film Festival, which is a big, totally international festival. Ours is the other side of the coin in a good way. We don’t mess with awards or anything like that. We just give filmmakers a chance to collaborate and to connect and to network.
When we started running our Talent Lab in 2016 with Tribeca, we learned that Luang Prabang is just a great place to lay back, relax, talk about your next project over a cold BeerLao. And it’s one of the reasons the Wall Street Journal in 2015 referred to LPFF as the “Sundance of Southeast Asia”. Because it’s in this atmosphere where creativity can thrive.
What stories are coming out from the festival entrants? What narratives are being highlighted this year?
We program the festival by using “motion picture ambassadors” in each country: an expert, often as a filmmaker or a film critic; we ask them each year, “give us ten recommendations and we’re going to choose our program from those.”
And so we then we watch those movies and motifs emerge from around the region. We begin to see, “oh, there seems to be a concern with women’s issues coming from Malaysia.” And we’re picking up on that on this Indonesian film as well. So let’s program these things side by side.
By programming that way, we can tell our programmers we want to see a diversity of voices, we want to see a diversity of languages. Give us everything, then we can narrow down a selection in which there’s a conversation happening from film to film.
And, you know, our audience is able to walk out of the theater and say, “I hadn’t thought of that that way.” The Cambodian filmmaker Sok Visal said about our festival in an interview in 2020, that it’s one of the festivals where you can really learn about the cultures of Southeast Asia and enjoy movies at the same time. Not in a didactic way, it’s just what happens to emerge from the programming.
You mentioned that Lao filmmakers have a big spotlight in the film fest. What’s your opinion on the present state of Lao filmmaking?
I’m really excited about it. There are two or three production collectives that operate in Vientiane, and they’re producing a couple of features every year right now. Compare that to a country like the Philippines, where we could choose from 200 films for this year’s festival. So we think of it as the little brother in certain ways to some of our neighbors.
But it’s really exciting what’s happening in Laos. There are great storytellers there: some are people who studied outside of the country, grew up in Laos, went away to study and came back. In the case of Mattie Do, a Lao-American filmmaker who mostly grew up in the US but has lived in Laos now for more than a decade.
There are also young people who are growing up entirely in Laos, who don’t have access to institutional film education in the country. What we have is a lot of native talent, excitement, and great storytelling that is unique to Lao culture.
The other part of our mission is, we also want to develop a native audience for Lao film. Most people in Laos are consuming media from Thailand. True, there’s a lot of great stuff in Thailand. But there are stories to be told in Laos as well. I just mentioned Mattie Do: her film The Long Walkis now on Netflix, and so audiences all around the region can now tune in and hear Lao language, which I think it’s really exciting and fun and it’s a great movie. It’s like a time paradox slasher film. It’s really it’s a great it’s a great movie, really smart.
What other films from the Mekong Subregion would you absolutely pester your friends to go watch?
One of the films I’m really excited about this year from Thailand is Fast and Feel Love. To me it’s a great example of some of the best contemporary Thai storytelling that I’d be happy to show at the night venue for popular audiences; or the day venue, which is mostly foreigners watching arthouse films. Fast and Feel Love hits an ideal sweet spot in contemporary Thai cinema in that it’s very smart, but it also reaches audiences all the way across the spectrum.
For people who haven’t already seen it, Kavich Neang’s White Building from Cambodia is a beautiful movie. It was at Cannes last year, and we’re very honored that during our first year of Talent Lab with Tribeca, he brought that project to Luang Prabang in the very early stages.
There’s a terrific movie, a Vietnamese film called Taste by Le Bao, which also has gotten great international attention around the world.
A couple of things from Myanmar: one of the most popular screenings during our virtual event was the film Mi, directed by Na Gyi, and it was released in 2020. It’s got beautiful cinematography, a really good noir story. There’s another one that we’ve shown a couple of times: first in 2017, and then brought back for the virtual festival as a retrospective film. It’s called Burma Storybook. The filmmakers are not Burmese, but they were in Myanmar and they traveled around the country to talk to people about their love of poetry. What emerges is this narrative about the ways that people can use poetry as a way of talking about what’s what’s happening in contemporary Myanmar without politically crossing a line.
Talking about the Mekong: our production, called Mekong 2030, is made up of five different stories, all set in the Mekong region, each one in a different country. That film is still showing around the world at festivals. One of those shorts, the Vietnamese Short, was in the Sundance Festival a year ago. We’re very proud of what’s happened with that.
