HOLLYWOOD - Acknowledging the difficulty of competing with more glamorous Asian film festivals ("It's appropriately humble not to try to match them--at
least for now."), Pimpaka Towira, the Bangkok Film Festival's programmer,
announced her selection of some 80 films to be screened at the fourth
annual festival set to begin on Nov. 16th and continue through the 25th.
"In terms of scale we're not that big. But what we're trying to do here
is to show movies from different countries that can reflect the big
picture, as well as the changes, of the international film arena at
present," Pimpaka told the Bangkok Post.
The U.S. is represented
in the festival with the Coen brothers' (Fargo) The Man Who Wasn't There, which won a best director award for Joel Coen at Cannes
in May and Todd Solondz's (Welcome to the Doll House,
Happiness) Storytelling, which raised a furor at Cannes,
primarily because of a scene in which a black professor sodomizes a white
student while demanding that she call him a "nigger."