Congratulations to filmmaker Kat Goh who bagged a special mention award for The Swimming Lesson… in Russia! At the Vladivostok International Film Festival to be precise. If you recall, the short film also bagged Best Film and Best Director at the Singapore Short Film Competition at this year’s SIFF.   ***   Did you know that under Thailand’s Ministry of Culture they have an Office for Contemporary Art and Culture? Shocking right? It’s not just Art but Contemporary Art! I don’t know the extent of their support (I saw it while watching a movie I’ll be talking about below) but just to have an official body focusing specifically on that is quite impressive, you must admit.   ***   Back to movies. Self-enclosed worlds was the underlying thread in three movies I’ve watched: yesterday’s Dogtooth and today’s Mental and Agrarian Utopia. In Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, which bagged the top prize for the Un Certain Regard section of this year’s Cannes Film Fest, it’s courtesy of the most bizarre case of parenting psychology someone has ever come up with on film. The story is about a family of five, where the three grown up kids have never had the privilege of knowing the outside world. As in they’ve never stepped out of their home. The result is an intact albeit skewed world where they think of airplanes as toys and kittens as vicious man-eating monsters. But quirky scenes are interspersed with some truly shocking black humour, full frontal nudity and at some point, incest. The rationale behind this strange bubble of a social order is never explained, but it makes for some interesting cinema. Linguists and psychologists will have fun dissecting Dogtooth. Mental, meanwhile, is a straightforward documentary by Kazuhiro Soda about a sort of halfway house for the mentally ill. Shot mainly inside the premises, we get a peek at their daily lives as they unashamedly talk about themselves and their “conditions” in the most humdrum manner possible (No Girl, Interrupted scenes here). So normal that I kinda fell asleep for a bit. Strangely enough, while the docu tried to paint a picture of an entire place and its inhabitants, I thought the most compelling character was the sanest of the lot – the doctor who apparently does it out of love and gets paid peanuts for it. Finally, there’s Agrarian Utopia. It’s a documentary about two Thai farmers and their family by Uruphong Raksasad. It was screened at this year’s SIFF. An agrarian documentary with Agrarian in the title doesn’t sound appetizing, I know, but it’s easily the freshest documentary I have ever seen – because it flows like a feature film. While it painstakingly details the characters’ journey from soldiers who try to eke out a living as farmers in the context of the recent political unrest in Thailand, the performances by the actors are so natural you wonder just how much directorial manipulation there was. But unless I’m mistaken, they weren’t actors. Unless they took a crash course in living like farmers. But there’s none of that “rough feel” that most documentaries have – no awkward camera angles, no looking at the camera – it’s as if, like I said, you were watching fiction. And on top of that is the gorgeous landscape of lush ricefields that Raksasad captures so well, tracking the changing of seasons and transforming scenery into an important character in itself.