Friday | March 8, 2019 7:00 pm

The Songs of Rice
(Pleng khong kao)

Introduction by Anocha Suwichakornpong

Directed by Uruphong Raksasad.
Thailand, 2014, DCP, color, 75 min.
Thai with English subtitles.

Uruphong Raksasad concludes his agriculture trilogy (Stories from the North, Agrarian Utopia) with a visual record of the lifecycle of Thailand’s most important and symbolic crop: rice. Focusing less on narrative and more on the visceral experience surrounding the farming, The Songs of Rice, as the title suggests, features the use of music and songs that chronicle the growth of rice, from cultivation, to harvest, right through to the moment when it is consumed. However, the songs in this film do not merely act as a soundtrack or accompaniment to the motion picture, rather, they document a traditional practice in which Thai farmers would sing to their beloved crop: the songs they sing were written for the rice. Raksasad, who himself came from a rice-farming family, presents this fascinating practice at the core of his artful study. The result is a masterfully crafted aural and visual tribute to rice and the people who cultivate it.

New Thai Cinema and The Songs of Rice introduction by Haden Guest and Anocha Suwichakornpong. Read transcript

Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Haden Guest 0:03
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. I want to thank you all for coming to tonight's screening, which launches a really exciting showcase of 21st century Thai cinema. And it was curated and this evening's film will be introduced by one of the leading lights of contemporary Thai cinema Anocha Suwichakornpong who was here, first, with a retrospective of her films a few years ago, but she's now here at Harvard as a visiting lecturer in the department that was formerly known as Visual and Environmental Studies, but from now on will be called the Department of Film, Art and Visual Studies. I'm very, very excited to be offering this really wonderful cross section of contemporary Thai cinema which includes many films that have never screened here in Boston and some not even in the US before. So it's a really a great moment to be rediscovering or to be discovering the films and the filmmakers that are really transforming contemporary filmmaking in Thailand today.

Our latest calendar includes many other wonderful programs. We have a great program of 60s Japanese cinema, which starts later this month. We have visits from Joao Moreira Salles, the Portuguese documentarian plus many, many more. So take a look at our calendar. I'd like to ask you to please turn off any cell phones or electronic devices that you have, please refrain from using them. And now with no further ado, please join me in welcoming Anocha Suwichakornpong.

[APPLAUSE]

Anocha Suwichakornpong 2:04
Thank you so much, Haden. And thank you everyone for being here tonight is the first night of the Thai cinema program, which will run until the 13th of April. And I'm very grateful for this invitation to to have this rare opportunity to program films from Thailand. When I first learned that I was given this opportunity I embraced it, and actually independent film in Thailand is quite small. So we know each other, or we most likely we would be friends or friends of friends. So I did not anticipate that it would be actually quite a difficult task because in the end, I had to eliminate some films by some of my friends, and I hope they're not too upset about it that some of their films are not shown in the program.

I don't want to spend too much time talking about my relationship to the film community in Thailand, but I have to say it is in a way integral to the way we make films because very often we are working with very limited resources and very little support from the government. So in the end, we all have to help each other out and very oftentimes, we would rotate in different roles in the process of filmmaking. For instance, I would work as a producer and some of my friends films. To give you an example there's a short film that is part of this program called A Room with a Coconut View. The director is called Tulapop Saenjaroen and he interned on my first feature more than 10 years ago. And since then he has worked with me in different capacities as casting director, location scout and but he's also a visual artist here and a filmmaker in his own right. And I helped him produce his film. Lee Chatametikool who is an editor and has edited almost all of Apichatpong's films, one of which we will see in the program called Tropical Malady, he started as a boom operator on Apichatpong's Blissfully Yours. And then he also made a film, which I helped co-produce, but it's not actually part of the program. It's called Concrete Clouds. I mean, you know, if you're interested, you can look up the film.

To introduce, the film tonight is by a really interesting filmmaker Uruphong Raksasad who studied filmmaking at a local university in Bangkok, Thammasat University. And he himself is from a rice farming family. After graduation he decided to move back to his hometown in the north of Thailand, which is Chiang Rai and he started to make films about his hometown and the farmers and the way of life in Chiang Rai. So the film we're seeing tonight is actually the last one in the Rice Trilogy is called The Songs of Rice.

And it's actually to do with songs related to rice farming. In Thailand we have this tradition where the rice farmers will actually sing songs to the rice when they start to cultivate the rice. And the songs will be sung throughout you know, at intervals, throughout the whole process of the rice cycle. So, from cultivation, through harvest, and even human consumption. So, I think it's really audacious in its form and also really driven by the power of images. It's quite interesting, sometimes when his work was shown at festivals, some people have have remarked or commented that his films share some similarities with the films from the Sensory Ethnography Lab here at Harvard. So I think I will be interested to talk to some of you afterwards. I mean, there's no q&a, I'm not the filmmaker of this film, but I'll be curious to listen to some comments and I can convey the messages back to the filmmaker. Without further ado, I will give you this film. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]

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