Since then, Fortissimo has done more than anyone else - including film festivals with specialist sidebars like Vancouver - to promote Asian films on the world market. The company notched up its most spectacular successes with the films of Cannes favourite Wong Kar-wai, whose In the Mood for Love (shot, incidentally, in Thailand) was one of the hits of Cannes 2000. And last year’s festival, reckons Barendrecht, was the turning point.

“Finally, it wasn’t just the critics who were interested in Asian cinema: all of a sudden, the buyers were as well. Distributors have become much more mature in knowing how to work with Asian cinema, and that gives me the chance to take on more exotic dishes - like Thai films.”

Last but not least in the causes of the Thai breakthrough has been the increasing international awareness and ambitions of the country’s three leading production companies. It was Tai Entertainment, headed by Visute Poolvoralaks, which produced the first real local success, 2499 antapan krong muang (Dang Bireley’s and the Young Gangsters), a stylish, fact-based crime saga which drew Thai audiences in numbers never before seen at screenings of local films. The same company also produced Nang Nak, a romantic drama described by critic Tony Rayns as “a landmark in South-East Asian cinema”, and the aforementioned Iron Ladies.

Tian Ponvanit’s Five Star Entertainment, meanwhile, was behind Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s 6ixtynin9, which Barendrecht describes as “a Thai Tarantino” and which picked up half a dozen prizes on the festival circuit. Rounding out the trio of key production companies is Film Bangkok, a subsidiary of BEC-Tero Entertainment, the country’s third TV channel, headed by Khun “Uncle” and Brian Marcar. Film Bangkok produced genre movie Bangkok Dangerous, directed by Hong Kong-born but Bangkok-based brothers Oxide and Danny Pang, which won the critics’ prize in Hong Kong in 2000. And, in the same year, Bangkok Films completed the movie that looks set to establish Thai cinema firmly on the international stage.

Bangkok Dangerous

For, whereas Cannes 2000 saw only a low-key Thai presence on the Croisette - 6ixtynin9, which premiered in the Berlin Forum, screened in the Market - Cannes 2001 will mark the first time ever that a Thai film has made it into Official Selection. The film in question is Wisit Sasanatieng’s Fa talai jone (Tears of the Black Tiger), which screens in Un Certain Regard. Already hailed as a breakthrough for the country’s emerging film industry (it won the Dragons & Tiger Award for best new director at Vancouver last autumn and was selected for Cannes shortly after), Tears is arguably the Thai industry’s first ‘post-modern’ movie, telling a traditional story in a very up-to-date way, creating images that resemble hand-coloured photographs.

And, while it can readily be enjoyed as a rattling good tale of tragic love and epic betrayal, it also works on another level, intensifying the emotion in a way that hovers somewhere between Hollywood melodrama and traditional storytelling. In the words of the film’s promotional brochure, Tears “offers nostalgia as future shock”.

Nang Nak

“I want the audience to feel like they’re reading a novel with moving illustrations,” says Sasanatieng. “It’s pure imagination and completely unrealistic.”

Like most members of what is by now firmly established as Thailand’s ‘New Wave’, Sasanatieng began his career working in advertising, having studied at Bangkok’s leading art college, Silpakorn University, with fellow New-Wavers Nonzee Nimibutr and Ek Iemchuen (who serve respectively as producer and production designer on Tears). And, when Nimibutr - who seems to function as the Francis Ford Coppola of the new Thai industry - left advertising for feature film-making in the mid-nineties, Sasanatieng and the others followed.

It is, of course, nothing new for young film-makers to make the leap from 30-second TV commercials to two-hour features. After all, the emergent British movie industry of the seventies was revitalised by former commercials-makers like Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne. So, too, the new Thai cinema owes a lot to directors who cut their creative teeth in the intense, visually-driven world of advertising. More particularly, some of the experiments Sasanatieng conducted while promoting Wrangler jeans and a brand of Thai noodles turned out to be very useful in giving Tears its unique look.

But there is a big difference from what happened with Parker and Scott. Where the European upstarts from the world of advertising were keen to make films that were more popular and more accessible, Sasanatieng has a somewhat different motive. “I wanted to try and go back to our roots,” he says of Tears, which marks his directorial debut after scripting Nimibutr’s films Dang Bireley’s and Nang Nak. “I wanted to make a link between the traditional and the contemporary in our own style.”