Do Audiences Still Go to the Cinema? An Answer from ITFF 2026 in Bangkok

Does fighting always mean wanting to win? Does a house necessarily represent security? And what happens when a declaration of love arrives at the exact moment the world begins to end?

CZMOS attended the first day of the International Thai Film Festival 2026 in Bangkok. Held at Phenix Pratunam, the festival brought together thirty international productions across feature films, short films, animation and music videos.

Rather than following a single aesthetic direction, the programme presented very different approaches to independent filmmaking. Some works relied on dialogue and recognisable narrative structures. Others created meaning through repetition, constructed spaces or deliberately unstable images.

Among the films screened during the first day, four shorts offered particularly interesting reflections on the boundary between reality and performance: Tinge Krishnan’s Nak Muay, Y. Iwanir and J. Ben Harosh’s Simple, Lionel Delplanque’s It’s Just a Game and Taejin Nam’s I Confessed Today.

They are very different works, but they share one question: what happens when something intended to protect, entertain or liberate us begins to produce real consequences?

Nak Muay and the moment winning is no longer enough

Directed by Tinge Krishnan, Nak Muay follows Yod, a Muay Thai star consumed by fame, excess and the weight of his past.

The short avoids using combat simply as spectacle. The ring remains physical, fast and visually engaging, but it becomes the place where the protagonist must confront the cost of victory.

Away from the audience, Yod looks after a childhood friend and former fighter who suffered irreversible brain damage after a match. His presence interrupts any straightforward glorification of violence.

The fighter’s body no longer represents only strength, technique and discipline. It also carries the consequences that sporting spectacle tends to leave outside the frame.

The final defeat therefore carries a different meaning from the simple loss of a match. Rather than deliberately throwing the fight, Yod appears to accept the possibility of not winning. The result becomes less important than recognising what fighting can do to a person.

Casting professional Muay Thai fighter Suablack in the leading role reinforces the film’s physical character. His movements do not seem designed solely for the camera. They carry the rhythm and weight of a body genuinely trained to fight.

Nak Muay does not simply condemn the sport. It observes the moment when the pursuit of glory loses contact with the individual inside the ring.

The protagonist’s redemption does not come through another victory, but through the possibility of interrupting the cycle leading him towards self-destruction.

Simple and the life imagined inside a house

While Nak Muay builds its argument through the body and combat, Simple chooses silence.

Directed by Y. Iwanir and J. Ben Harosh, the short contains no dialogue. Its protagonist is building a house, an apparently concrete and linear act that gradually becomes a projection of the future.

As the building takes shape, he imagines the life that might unfold inside it. The house contains more than walls, furniture and possessions. It holds an entire idea of stability: routines, habits and the repetition of an everyday life that already appears organised.

The film then jumps forward. What initially looks like a promise of security becomes a sequence of similar days, almost determined before they have been lived. After moving through this possible existence, the story returns to the present and to the act of construction.

The simplicity suggested by the title may represent the desire to reduce life to an understandable structure: to build a space, inhabit it and repeat familiar gestures.

Yet the film also exposes the ambiguity of this vision.

Stability can offer protection, but it can also become immobility.

When the narrative returns to its starting point, the house is no longer simply a house. It has become a question: are we building the future we desire, or a structure in which we believe we are expected to live?

It’s Just a Game and the consequences of fiction

The title of Lionel Delplanque’s It’s Just a Game already contains an excuse: it is only a game. The short, however, questions whether play can ever be completely separated from its consequences.

At first, the arrangement of the characters makes the audience believe it understands the balance of power.

Two figures appear to occupy a servant-like position in relation to the others. It is gradually revealed that these roles do not necessarily correspond to their real identities. The characters are performing within a game, and the hierarchy has temporarily been reversed.

The revelation changes everything that came before it. Gestures, commands and behaviours that appeared to belong to reality are repositioned within an agreed performance. Their fictional nature, however, does not automatically make them meaningless.

The game gives the characters a space in which to explore power, submission, desire and sexuality. It also allows them to hide behind the phrase contained in the title. If something becomes uncomfortable, it can always be dismissed as part of the performance.

The reversal is therefore more than a narrative device designed to surprise the audience. It shows how easily identities and hierarchies can be created through representation.

The game may end, but what it allowed the participants to express does not disappear quite so easily.

I Confessed Today and an apocalypse at the worst possible moment

In I Confessed Today, directed by South Korean filmmaker Taejin Nam, a recognisable emotional moment is interrupted by something completely absurd.

Just as someone finally manages to confess their love, the world descends into a zombie-like apocalypse. The collision between romance and catastrophe initially creates a comic effect.

An intimate gesture that has probably been prepared and feared for a long time suddenly becomes irrelevant in the face of the end of the world.

The film plays with the contrast between the enormous importance a confession holds for the person making it and its insignificance compared with what is happening outside. Before the apocalypse, saying what one feels seems like the most difficult event imaginable. Moments later, survival replaces every other concern.

Visually, the apocalyptic sequence recalls the instability of imagery generated through artificial intelligence. Bodies, spaces and movements appear strange and not always consistent from one shot to the next. This discontinuity creates some distance from the more human dimension of the confession, while also reinforcing the impression that the world itself is losing its rules.

The result opens a discussion about the potential and limitations of generative tools in independent cinema. The technology can make scenarios accessible that would otherwise be difficult to realise on a limited budget, but it can also weaken the emotional and visual continuity of a story.

Do people still go to the cinema?

Towards the end of the first day, the programme shifted its attention from individual films to the future of theatrical cinema.

During the directors’ panel, one speaker challenged the idea that audiences no longer want to go to the cinema. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was cited as an example: an approximately three-hour, R-rated adaptation of Greek mythology that surpassed $1.67 billion at the global box office.

I think cinema today is still as strong as it ever was. The world will still go to a movie, but you have to give them a reason.

The observation does not deny the difficulties experienced by many theatres, nor does it suggest that every film can reproduce the scale or commercial power of a Nolan production. Instead, it reframes the question.

The challenge may not simply be convincing a distracted audience to abandon streaming, but creating something that is perceived as a genuinely cinematic experience.

Giving audiences a reason can mean spectacle and scale, but it does not have to mean only that. It can involve creating an image that deserves a larger screen, building a shared experience or telling a story that would lose part of its intensity outside the cinema.

A festival dedicated to independent cinema makes this reflection less obvious. The films screened during the day do not possess the resources of major international productions. Yet, with varying degrees of success, they attempt to use cinematic language to create experiences that cannot be reduced to the rapid consumption of content.

Following the panel, the programme returned to screenings with the Vietnamese feature Flying Cows, the Colombian animation Tuktu and the Russian film Pastures of the Gods.

The first day therefore concluded after moving from the red carpet to short films, animation, genre cinema and conversations with industry professionals.

A reason to remain in front of the screen

Nak Muay, Simple, It’s Just a Game and I Confessed Today do not share the same genre or level of formal maturity. What connects them is the movement from imagination to consequence.

Yod must confront what violence in the ring can leave on another person’s body. The protagonist of Simple observes in advance the life contained within the future he is building. The characters of It’s Just a Game discover that a performed role can expose genuine tensions.

In I Confessed Today, a romantic fantasy is overwhelmed by an apocalypse that immediately changes the value of every choice.

The directors’ panel added a larger question: what can still persuade us to leave our homes and sit together in front of a screen?

The answer offered during the panel is simple, but it is not comforting. Audiences have not necessarily stopped loving cinema. Cinema must continue to give them a reason to seek it out.