Thai cinema returns to Cannes with its strongest showing in years

For the first time since 2007, a Thai feature film is screening in Cannes’ Directors' Fortnight – and a Thai short is running simultaneously in Critics' Week. Two films, two parallel sections, one unusually strong year for Thai cinema.

9 Temples to Heaven, directed by Sompot Chidgasornpongse and produced by Apichatpong Weerasethakul – still Thailand's only Palme d'Or winner –  premieres this week at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. The last Thai feature selected for Directors' Fortnight was Ploy by Pen-ek Ratanaruang nearly two decades ago.

The setup feels unmistakably Thai. A multi-generational family crams into a van to complete a nine-temple pilgrimage after a fortune teller warns their grandmother is running out of time. Three generations, one ageing matriarch, simmering family tensions and a Christian girlfriend trapped inside the same vehicle for the day. Directors' Fortnight described it as a ‘delightfully sharp and tender road-trip comedy’ – absurd in places, unexpectedly emotional in others. The project spent nine years in development and received partial backing from Thailand’s Ministry of Culture.

Sompot may be making his first fiction feature, but he has hardly arrived out of nowhere. He spent more than two decades working alongside Apichatpong on films including Tropical Malady, Cemetery of Splendour and Memoria. His 2016 documentary Railway Sleepers – a slow, observant portrait of life aboard Thai trains – previously premiered at the Berlinale

The short heading to Critics’ Week moves in a much stranger direction. What Do You Seek in the Dark? runs just 19 minutes and unfolds almost entirely inside one of Thailand's disappearing second-run cinemas – the sort where a late-night screening of Nosferatu quietly doubles as a cruising ground. Tossaphon Riantong, previously known for writing Bad Genius: The Series, Delete for Netflix, and I Told Sunset About You, leans fully into queer surrealism here. Desire and dread sit so close together the film barely separates them.

Critics' Week described the short as a vampiric game of hide-and-seek filled with cinephile references and late-night unease.  Tossaphon has also spoken openly about his fascination with Thailand’s fading independent cinemas and the secret lives that once unfolded inside them. It's the first Thai short ever selected for the section.

Away from the screenings themselves, Thailand arrived at Cannes with a noticeably more coordinated industry push than usual. The Thailand Pavilion opened on May 13 at Stand 112 inside the Village International under the government’s ‘Content Thailand’ strategy – a cross-ministry effort spanning Commerce, Culture and Tourism aimed at positioning Thai film and digital production more aggressively overseas.

That includes a Thai Pitch event introducing three projects to international investors and co-producers, a showcase created with industry outlet Deadline spotlighting five Thai films to global distributors and fifteen Thai production houses currently in Cannes for trade meetings. There's also a new incentive scheme offering up to 20 percent cash rebates for qualifying productions that hire Thai digital content companies for animation, VFX, gaming or post-production work worth more than five million baht. Cannes is exactly where you go to sell that ambition.

BamBam of GOT7 also joins the Thai delegation this year, appearing on the red carpet as part of the cast of The Confession of Shaman, which reaches cinemas on August 12. It's smart festival positioning considering how heavily his international fanbase overlaps with the audiences Thai horror increasingly targets overseas.

The bigger shift is that Thailand finally arrived at Cannes with actual films competing in actual sections – not only a pavilion, a slogan and a handful of networking sessions. For once, the cinema and the commerce are moving in parallel. Whether the incentives lead to anything lasting is still impossible to know. But when the films themselves are this strong and the industry around them finally looks coordinated, it feels worth paying attention.