Thailand's Oscar entry was made by eight countries
Photo: Still from 9 Temples to Heaven
Thailand has submitted 9 Temples to Heaven for the Academy Award for best international feature, a family drama financed across eight territories that opened in Thai cinemas on 17 September.
The production companies run to At A Time Pictures and Kick the Machine Films in Thailand, E&W Films in Singapore, Petit Chaos in France, Needle in the Haystack in Norway, La Fonte in China, Square One Film in Hong Kong and Qun Film in Indonesia.
Kick the Machine is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's company, and the Palme d'Or winner is among the film's producers. It premiered at Cannes in May.
That structure is the Thai industry's answer to a market that cannot finance an arthouse feature on its own, and it is an increasingly standard one: a film assembled from soft money and co-production treaties across three continents, then submitted as the work of one country.
"9 Temples to Heaven" premiered at Cannes and opened in Bangkok last month. Its producers are spread across Thailand, Singapore, France, Norway, China, Hong Kong and Indonesia.
It sits oddly against the other Thai export story running this month. Busan's Asian Contents and Film Market opens on Saturday with Thailand as its first Country of Honour, and the centrepiece of that programme is a strand selling remake rights to five Thai commercial features.
Those are two different theories of what Thailand sells. One is authorship, routed through festivals and foreign co-financiers. The other is format, scripts that work when somebody else shoots them with their own stars.
The commercial side is considerably larger. More than 540 foreign productions shot in Thailand last year under a cash rebate scheme worth up to 30%, a service business that dwarfs anything the country's own arthouse sector turns over.
Thailand has reached the Academy's international feature shortlist once, with Pat Boonnitipat's How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies in 2024. It has never been nominated.
Japan has submitted All of a Sudden, itself a France-Japan co-production backed by Cinefrance Studios alongside Office Shirous and Bitters End.
British audiences can see the Thai entry this month. 9 Temples to Heaven is in the London Film Festival programme, which runs to 18 October and carries 251 titles from 88 countries.
The Academy announces its shortlist of fifteen in December. Thailand's submission will be judged against entries from more than ninety countries, most of them financed the same way.
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