True/False Films

Love on Delivery

This film is fully or mostly subtitled.

In person: I-chat with Janus Metz

Sneak preview. A plush, richly photographed and scored doc — in the high-quality Danish way — about the Thai marriage pipeline extending from Bangkok to a remote fishing village in Denmark. Here a modern-day Thai yenta (married to a Danish man herself) cuts through thick bureaucracy to import hundreds of Thai women who change the fortunes of the lonely. One hopeful man named Kjeld fancies a young Thai named Kae, and their good-natured attempts to communicate via dictionary are a sweet counterpoint to other harder stories. Metz benefits from extraordinary access to these men and women, and this yields a host of intimate, sometimes uncanny vignettes that could play on cable TV if it wasn't done with such a nuanced approach. Plays with Tongzhi in Love (dir. Ruby Yang, 2008, 30 min.), an innovative short which tells the story of gay Chinese men who attend to family obligations while steering toward the life they secretly want to lead. In a homophobic society, they men fear making any kind of gesture or slip that would reveal their secrets. Using recreations, poetic cinematography, confessionals, and imaginative animation, Tongzhi manages to evocate an entire world. Scared (dir. John Biewen, 3 min.) is an audio short from the Third Coast International Audio Festival, in which a guy muses on the fears associated with a loved one's body. (PS)