Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
Quite regularly, I am contacted by people who try to get hold of The Most Secret Place on Earth. There’s now a German language DVD of the full 78 minute version, but most of the interest comes from English speakers.But at least the 52 minute TV version is now on youtube and you can find [...]
Sacred Skin, the first English language book on Thailand’s sacred tattoos, got excellent coverage recently in the newsletter of the Pha Tad Ke Botanical Garden in Laos. Besides the obvious flowery news there are always a few pages dedicated to books with regional topics. Thanks to Pha Tad Ke for featuring us. It’s the first [...]
On a recent trip to Cambodia, I noticed that my first non fiction book Beyond the Pancake Trench is still being sold as a bootleg photocopy in Siem Reap bookshops. I was browsing the shelves of a pirate DVD shop in Phnom Penh a couple days ago, when I found, much to my surprise, that [...]
The trailer of Camera Camera (2009), a documentary film by Malcolm Murray, about the nature and effect of mass tourism in Laos, offers an intriguing glimpse of the Land of the Million Elephants and the million backpackers that travel through it. Who said the camera never lies, one might as oneself, as one looks at [...]
Spent a few days in Vientiane, Laos’ rather compact capital. This city of some 200.000 is just waking up from 35 years of communism induced slumber, but, like a child that’s slept too long, the awakening is a little disconcerting, reluctant and modest. Traffic has increased in recent years, but crossing the riverfront road that [...]
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The Most Secret Place on Earth – The CIA’s Covert War in Laos will be shown as part of the Lifescapes Film Festival in Chiang Mai this week. The screeing is on Sunday, February 6th at 14.30. For further details, please visit the Festival Website. For an enlightened and accurate telling of the CIA´secret history [...]
The Most Secret Place on Earth premiered in Australia on ABC1 television on January 24th at 9.30pm. Ironically, The Most Secret Place on Earth competed with Generation Kill, showing on ABC2 at the same time, a seven-part war mini-series about a Rolling Stone reporter embedded with US troops in Iraq. About the film: For a [...]
Here’s a 2008 review of The Most Secret Place on Earth (The CIA Covert War in Laos) by Allan Myers in Direct Action. Here’s a non-trivial question for trivia night organisers: In the late 1960s, what was the world’s busiest airport? Stumped? Here’s a hint: What was the most bombed country, per capita, in the [...]
Veteran Bangkok journalist Jim Pollard reviews The Most Secret Place on Earth – The CIA´s Covert War in Laos in The Nation newspaper, following the film´s second screening at the Foreign Corespondents Club in Bangkok in November. In his review he lauds the film as one of the best documentaries in recent years and remarks [...]