This review may contain spoilers.

Still unpacking it. Some impressions:
- Eerie but never unsettling. Matches well the feeling of knowing death is coming.
- “Are you excited?” “It’s the same as when I would give a presentation.”
- Reminds me of Shape of Water because... well... you know why...
- Why did Jen and Tong have the out of body experience at the end? Maybe is it a manifestation of how detached you feel after someone close dies?
- I read this was the final installment in a series of projects by the director. Would love to watch the rest but I don’t know where to find them.

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Well I’m heading home! Our last two days in Thailand were very low key. Less bussing around and more walking through neighborhoods.

Went back to The Loft Cafe and had an orange iced coffee which was lovely. The shop seems like it’s run by true coffee aficionados. Framed coffee tasting wheels, Thai coffee magazines, a siphon brewer. Even a roaster in the back but I don’t know if they actively roast their beans. I should have grabbed an espresso in retrospect. The coffee scene in Chiang Mai in general has been top notch. Would really love to come back and seek out the best cafés. 😛

Even the coffee shop attached to the hotel, 49 Coffee, was pretty decent. Lovely setting and design at least. I had an espresso this morning that was pretty good, at least on par with most neighborhood shops in the states.

And two days ago I had an iced latte that took an approach I’d heard of but never tried, at Cup Fine Day: frozen coffee cubes in milk. Scrumptious until you’re left with the cubes. Then it’s a bitter crunch to finish it off.

Suffice to say: good coffee here. Aside from that, great food as well. Had tom kha and phanaeng and both were spicy and scrumptious.

A vibe. Weird film to watch right after A Brighter Summer Day. Almost antithetical in terms of form. Heavy emphasis on the feeling of the moment that it’s capturing. Would love to read more on this because I think I didn’t approach it with the right headspace or context. Loved Moonlight and I know Barry Jenkins has mentioned Claire Denis as a huge inspiration, and that’s very apparent. But it didn’t quite grab me like I hoped it would.

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This review may contain spoilers.

Didn’t expect this to be so sad. A really interesting look at how violence begets violence in youth culture.

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One of the more surprising things I’ve found on this trip is that my hotel WiFi has symmetrical up/down internet speeds of around 100 mbps. In fact, according to Speetest.net, Thailand as a country has a median upload speed of 172.95 mbps. There are probably flaws in this dataset, but that’s still shocking. The USA in comparison has a measly 22.78 mbps average upload speed.

What this means for me practically is I’ve been able to back up my footage every night to multiple cloud services, and it’s finished before I go out in the morning. How lovely! 🥰 I can only imagine how wonderful life would be if these kinds of upload speeds were available everywhere in the states. (Insert futuristic society meme.)

Also - realized today I totally should have watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which is a Thai film. I’ll watch it on the flight back!

In terms of food (the most important terms), today I ate eggs benedict for breakfast, with an iced coffee and some muesli. In the middle of the day, we went up to the mountains, met some elephants and stopped for khao soi for lunch (delicious!) with an iced latte (yes, I needed it) and mango with sticky rice as a dessert. Later, we walked through the night market on the outside of the old city. We went for Greek food at a place that you had to know was there, otherwise you wouldn’t find it. Down this alley and that. I had a falafel “sandwich” (and the falafels were sooo good, not too dry) and a Singha.

It’s my first morning in Thailand. Yesterday we got some coffee (I got lychee iced coffee - so good) and for dinner ate crispy pork belly which was transcendent.

On the flight I ended up watching A Brighter Summer Day and Beau travail. Two very different films. Both good. I feel like maybe I wasn’t quite in the right headspace for Beau travail after A Brighter Summer Day, which is so much more rooted in reality.

Last night I offloaded the b-roll and a few interviews I shot and added metadata in Resolve, renaming the clips using Resolve’s smart renaming using the metadata I inputted. Feels good to finally use that organizational method!

Over the next six days, I’ll be traveling to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to interview some missionaries that the church supports. I thought I’d keep a small travel log here for the heck of it. I don’t know if I’ll keep up with it but at least I’ve started.

Currently, I’m sitting in the international terminal at SFO waiting to board our flight. We have a 14 hr flight to Taipei and then a 4 hr connecting flight to Chiang Mai, Thailand. I’ve downloaded multiple movies that I’ve been wanting to watch but haven’t because they’re either too long to watch after a workday or too heavy. The films I’ve downloaded are:

• Yi Yi
• A Brighter Summer Day (The longest film on the list, clocking in at just under four hours.)
• A Touch of Zen
• Seven Samurai
• Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
• Drive My Car
• Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
• Andrei Rublev
• Stalker
• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
• Beau travail
• Cléo from 5 to 7 (The shortest film, at an hour and a half.)
• Metropolis

We’ll see how many of these I’ll actually get around to watching. I know I need to sleep but the idea of 14 uninterrupted hours of movie watching time is a delightful prospect.

I’m traveling with some borrowed gear from the church, courtesy of Jamie Rom. I have the Canon R5 shooting in 4K with CLog3 and two lenses: the Canon RF 15-35mm f/2.8 which will be my primary lens, and a 24-105mm for any time I might need a telephoto. The goal is to get tons of b-roll in addition to a solid interview. I’m shooting in 4K in the IPB Light codec flavor, mostly so as to optimize card space as I’d like to avoid formatting cards while I’m on the trip. We’ll see how that goes and if I have to pivot midway.