Araya Rasdjamreansook*

Araya Rasdjamreansook (b. 1957) is an artist who works primarily with film and video; a writer of fiction, poetry, art criticism; and a retired professor from Chiang Mai University, where she established the pioneering Multidisciplinary Arts programme. Rasdjamreansook’s practice explores tensions between narratives and bodies, death and life, humor and tragedy, knowledge and ignorance. Her works often deploy complex and provocative imagery that draws attention to taboos relating to Thai culture, gender, and the expected roles of artists, writers, teachers, and women. Rasdjarmrearnsook is one of Southeast Asia’s most respected and internationally active contemporary artists. Her video, installation, and graphic works have been regularly shown in museums and biennials around the world for over 30 years, including the Venice Biennale (2005), Documenta (2012), and a retrospective exhibition at the Sculpture Center in New York City (2015). She lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Chikako Yamashiro*

Chikako Yamashiro is a Japanese filmmaker and video artist. Her works in photography, video and performance create visual investigations into the history, politics and culture of her homeland Okinawa. Particularly salient are themes related to the terrible civilian casualties incurred in Okinawa, Japan during World War II and the on-going troubles and hardships caused by the U.S. military presence there. Since 2019 she is associate professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts.

Hirokazu Kore-eda

Hirokazu Kore-eda was born in 1962 in Tokyo, Japan. Before embarking on a career as a film director, Kore-eda worked as an assistant director on documentaries for television. 

He eventually transitioned into directing, and directed his first television documentary, Lessons from a Calf, in 1991. He directed several other documentary films thereafter. In 2014, he launched his production company Bun-Buku and has since directed more than a dozen feature films, including Afterlife (1999), Nobody Knows (2004), Still Walking (2008), and After the Storm (2016). He won the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival for Like Father, Like Son and won the Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters.

Korakrit Arunanondchai*

The work of Korakrit Arunanondchai (b. 1986, Thailand) focuses on the transformative potential of storytelling. With each project, the artist expands his cosmos of interconnected stories told through expansive video installations, paintings, objects, and performative works. In his videos, he processes experiences in his personal environment just as he does political events, history, and questions to our crisis-ridden present. Born in Bangkok and working primarily in Bangkok and New York, Arunanondchai often draws upon the cultural contexts in his own biography as well as spaces with postcolonial trauma. Using essayistic and experimental approaches, the artist works with multiple collaborators to assemble audio and visual materials from various sources. With references to philosophy and myth, his narratives weave together questions about consciousness, empathy, and community.

Lawan Jirasuradej*

Lawan Jirasuradej started her career as a television reporter and educational video production and latre branched out into documentary filmmaking. She produced video documentary for Thai and international organizations and NGOs with topics such as human rights, HIV-AIDS, migrant workers, sex workers, malnutrition, river training, agriculture, arts & culture. She made an hour-long video documentary Mama wa Hunzi, filmed in Kenya and Uganda and received several film grants and artist residency in the United States and Netherlands. Working in different parts of the world—South Asia, East Africa, the U.S., and ASEAN, she has produced documentary in different formats: film, video, radio program, book, articles, etc. In 2024 she will launch documentary in text—Flights of Courage—bio of a Thai boy runaway to China under Chairman Mao and graduated as traditional Chinese medicine doctor at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Lawan also participates in Womanifesto, an international art exchange. Her video installation Artist Hands is currently showing at “Womanifesto: Flowing Connections”, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (14 Sep – 30 Dec, 2023).

Mohamad Malas

Mohamad Malas was born in 1945 in Quneitra on the Golan Heights. He is a prominent Syrian filmmaker whose films garnered him international recognition. Malas is among the first auteur filmmakers in Syrian cinema.

Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007)

Ousmane Sembène, often credited in the French style as Sembène Ousmane which he seemed to favor as a way to underscore the “colonial imposition” of this naming ritual and subvert it, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer.

Paijong Laisakul, Isan Film Group*

Paijong Laisakul is a member of the Isan Film Group, a collective of student artist-activists formed around Paijong Laisakul, Surachai Jantimatorn and Euthana Mukdasanit from the leftist youth-counterculture movement at Thammasat University,  two years after the Siamese revolution. Together they produced the film Tongpan, for which the filmmakers were arrested during the 1973 crackdown. The film was later banned until 1978 for its socialist undertone, making it an easy target for accusations of communism. The film never received a theatrical release and instead entered into a network of makeshift itinerant guerrilla screenings, re-appropriating the spaces used by US sponsored screenings of propaganda films against communism. Within this historical background of both national as well as international power configurations, Tongpan is today re-visited as an important document of Thai film history, not only for its content but also its dissemination.

Riar Rizaldi*

Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. He works predominantly in moving image and sound, both in cinema settings and spatial presentation as installation. His artistic practice focuses mostly on the relationship between technology, labour, and nature, worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibility of theoretical fiction.

Saeed Taji Farouky*

Saeed Taji Farouky is a Palestinian-British filmmaker who has been producing work around themse of conflict, human rights, and colonialism since 2004. 

His previous documentary, Tell Spring Not to Come This Year, premiered at the Berlinale in 2015 where it won the Panorama Audience Award and the Amnesty Human Rights Award. His films focus on exile and the lingering trauma of conflict. He tells intimate, personal stories with an emphasis on humanism, and its mirror image: surrealism. Saeed participated in the Edinburgh International Film Festival talent lab and the Torino Script Lab with his first fiction feature project. 

Sasithorn Ariyavicha

Sasithorn Ariyavicha is a Thai experimental filmmaker. Birth of the Senema premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2004.

Sriwhana Spong*

Sriwhana Spong (b. 1979, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand) is an artist based in London, UK. Drawing on the ecstatic practices of female mystics, Spong produces scripts of her body that document in various media the oscillations of distance and intimacy produced by her approach toward another – most recently, a rat nesting outside her window; a newly discovered species of snake; a painting by her grandfather, the Balinese painter I Gusti Made Rundu; and a twelfth-century Javanese poem. These encounters spark journeys, where experiential knowledge, autobiography, fiction and systematic research produce films, sculptures, performances and reorientations. 

Thamrong Rujanaphand (1911-1988)

Thamrong Rujanaphand was born in 1911, in Lampang, a town in the north of Thailand. He studied in Bangkok and attended art school in Shanghai. Upon his return, he married a woman from the southernmost province of Narathiwat and moved there. Thamrong set up a photo studio and started working as a cameraman for weddings and ceremonial events, while also recording everyday happenings around the deep south region. Back then, almost every region in Thailand had amateur filmmakers who made low-budget films and released them in local cinemas. Thamrong wrote and produced Tamone Prai in 1959. When he passed away in 1988, his family donated all his films to the Thai Film Archive. 

Thierno Faty Sow (1941-2009)

Thierno Faty Sow was born in 1941 in Thiès, Senegal. He was a director and actor, known for Camp de Thiaroye (1988), L’option (1974) and L’oeil (1981). He died in 2009 in Dakar, Senegal.

Ho Tzu Nyen*

Steeped in numerous Eastern and Western cultural references, Ho Tzu Nyen’s works blend mythical narratives and historical facts to mobilise different understandings of history, its writing, and its transmission. The central theme of his oeuvre is a long-term investigation of the plurality of cultural identities in Southeast Asia, a region so multifaceted in terms of its languages, religions, cultures, and influences that it is impossible to reduce it to a simple geographical area or a fundamental historical base. This observation is reflected in his works, which weave together different regimes of knowledge, narratives, and representations. From documentary research to fantasy, his work combines archival images, animation and film in installations that are often immersive and theatrical.