‘Songwat Film Day’ brings analogue charm to Song Wat this August 4-12

Some memories digital can never replace. The click of a film cameras shutter. The wait while an image surfaces on photographic paper. Colours that come out imperfect and are somehow better for it. Fragments of moments that once existed, rather than 400 near-identical versions sitting in your camera roll.

Song Wat understands this. From August 4-12, the 100-Year-Old Gate Alley hosts Song Wat Film Day: Craft & Indie Market, and the old riverside warehouse zone hands itself over to people who still shoot 35mm without apologising for it. The setting does half the work: shophouse façades with paint coming away in sheets, dried goods stacked in sacks outside wholesale shops that have traded here for generations, boat horns from the Chao Phraya and a stray cat asleep on a stack of pallets. The neighbourhood becomes the subject – its alleyways, its shopkeepers and the details you walk past daily without noticing.

What's actually there? Film cameras and the accessories that keep them running, handmade work from local makers, vinyl still doing its thing decades after everyone declared it finished. There are craft drinks and wine too, so you can sit somewhere shaded while conversation and music settle around you. It’s the sort of market where you arrive wanting a roll of Portra and leave three hours later with a record, a ceramic cup and mild sunburn.

The whole point is slowness. Wander. Shoot badly. Shoot again. Let the light do something strange through a warehouse doorway and trust that it works out – or don'’t, because that’s rather the deal with film.

Song Wat Film Day: Craft & Indie Market runs August 4-12 at the 100-Year-Old Gate Alley in Song Wat’s riverside warehouse zone (opposite Adidas), 10am-8pm. Entry is free.