Their horror film was banned as a national security threat, so this Thai couple opened their own cinema
- Cinema Oasis was opened on family land in Sukhumvit in the heart of Bangkok
- The cinema shows films that don’t normally make it to festivals
What would you do if the government banned your films? In Thailand, a husband and wife team responded by building their own cinema.
Manit Sriwanichpoom and Ing Kanjanavanit (who goes by Ing K) had made a horror film in 2011 called Shakespeare Must Die, based on the Thai translation of Macbeth. A theatre troupe staged the Scottish Play in the film and they all came to a gruesome end because their vengeful government was sensitive to certain similarities between Shakespeare’s bloody tyrant and the ruler, Mekhdeth.
Thailand’s real life censors under the Yingluck Shinawatra government banned the film as a national security threat because there were visual references to the paramilitary’s brutal crackdown of student protesters at Thammasat University on October 6, 1976.
As a provocative comeback, Ing and Manit made a film in 2013 using footage they recorded during their fruitless negotiations with the officials and called it Censor Must Die. The film censors gave it the green light, to their surprise. “Apparently, films recording events that really happened do not have to go through the censorship process,” Ing says.
But there was a catch. No cinema has dared show it because the government says it never gave the filmmakers permission to shoot in the Ministry of Culture office.