Link here.
The Bangkok International Film Festival is usually pretty crappy. We used to try to attend some of the films, there’s always a few good ones thrown in, but the festival is always spread out over several different venues, they invariably change the venue of any given movie without warning to another location across the city, and the very best films usually just get cancelled anyway for whatever reason. I remember they showed an Almodovar film one time, but there were NO subtitles whatsoever, Thai OR English. How many Spanish-speakers do you think there are in Thailand? The local movie critics still sat through it but didn’t have a clue as to what the heck the movie was all about. The festival organizers had no idea that that was not English being spoken. A typical snafu at this “festival”, and we and many others have simply given up on it, it’s always so poorly run.
That said, I am saddened that Thailand would yank this award-winning animated piece from Iran at the “request” of the Iranian Embassy. Hardly unprecedented, as they banned The Satanic Verses back in the late 1980s when that controversy broke out. (I remember having a copy mailed to me here back then, the first – and maybe only – time I’ve read a banned book in a country in which it was banned. Gave me a good feeling of getting away with something.) But I really hate to see this sort of thing.