Inthira Hotels & Restaurants presented Laos’ biggest ever basket of sticky rice (khao niao) at the opening of LAOFOOD 2018 Exhibition, held at the National Convention Centre in Vientiane from 7-9 July, while also taking home honors at the event’s hospitality and culinary competitions.
Laos Expresses Contentment With North Korean-US Summit
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Laos (MOFA) has issued a statement welcoming the recent outcome of the North Korean-US Summit held in Singapore last week.
This Week in Lao Social Media
First Lady of Laos Visits Soldiers at Southern Border
This week the Lao social media has been awash with national pride after pictures emerged of the PM’s wife, Mrs Naly Sisoulith, making a trip to visit Lao soldiers stationed in the south. The First Lady of Laos swapped her sinh for military fatigues and set off into the jungle to offer her support for the military at the southern border of Laos.
Mrs Naly personally donated refreshments and supplies to the soldiers, and wished them good fortune with a baci ceremony.
From the looks of the photos, the trip to the camp was somewhat arduous, and a photo of Mrs Naly deftly skipping across the uneven ground captured the hearts of Lao social media users. Not bad for a woman who is nearly 70 years of age!
Photos: Support Prime Minister Sisoulith
Lao Flag Flies High at World Cup Opening Ceremony
The Lao flag has been spotted at the 2108 FIFA World Cup opening ceremony, held at the Luzhniki Stadium in Russia.
Lao journalist Mr Ekasan Thippachanh attended the event, bringing the flag of Laos with him. Photos and videos of Ekasan with the flag went viral in Lao social media as world cup fever takes over!
Photos: Pakaad
Bokeo Officials Set Prices for Pork and Beef
In an effort to control the price of meats at the markets, a Bokeo official seems to be holding up a banner that stipulates the prices for pork and beef. Consumers are urged to call the phone numbers included on the banner if there are vendors who violate the guidelines set by the Bokeo District Department of Industry and Commerce.
Social media users praised the government’s move as it would protect consumers against the rising cost of living.
Photos: Pakaad
Savannakhet Citizens Seriously Perturbed by Foul Smell From Nearby Paper Factory
Netizens from Seno (Savannaket) have made exceptionally strong complaints on social media for the past several days about a terrible odor that has invaded their beautiful city. Unconfirmed sources point to a nearby Chinese-owned paper factory, Sun Paper, that has been blamed as the cause of the odor.
The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE) has been urged to take action and inspect the activities of the paper factory.
Essential ingredients
Keeping it real is the name of the game for Les Artisans Lao
High above an art gallery, in a small room in a narrow building off a side street in downtown Vientiane, is a humming laboratory.
There, young locals in white lab coats hover over heating and cutting machines, surrounded by glass vials and bubbling oils. Shelves are crammed with brown bottles, many with hand-written labels. It could be a mad scientist’s lab, or a chemist’s workspace, except that the smell is just heavenly. There’s citronella, tea-tree and jojoba, for a start, and the busy-bee workers are trialling products to see how they perform as essential oils, soap, shampoo, lip balm and insect repellent.
This last is one of the company’s best sellers – one of several beautifully packaged cosmetic products that form part of a range by Les Artisans Lao, a company that makes natural skincare products, fragrances and handicrafts, including furniture and jewellery.
Les Artisans Lao is the brainchild of Michel Saada, a French native who has been in Laos so long, he can’t ever imagine going back to his old life in France. It was more than 25 years ago that Saada left Paris, where he ran a restaurant, and fetched up in Vientiane. That was in 1993, back when Laos was just opening up to international tourism. It was a very different place then – no cars, no motorbikes, not much commercial enterprise. But, desperate for a reason to stay in a place he had swiftly fallen in love with, Saada began making handicrafts.
It began, he says, with an ornamental bowl made of coconut, which fell on the floor and shattered. He put a hole in one piece and began wearing it as a necklace, and before too long, he was making them for anyone who asked. He moved on to other decorative pieces made from coconut, and eventually opened a gallery, T’Shop-Lai, in a repurposed terrace house a street back from the Mekong, still his main headquarters today.
He moved onto a special technique involving crushed eggshells and resin, from which he and his team make everything from furniture to homewares, and invited other artists to stage exhibitions in the space. In the process, he was also training young, unskilled Lao people to create objects and run the business with him.
“Usually, I train people, and soon they can do the work even better than me,” he says.
But even with a gallery and burgeoning handicrafts business, he couldn’t quite solve the conundrum of throwing away piles of coconut flesh as a by-product of many of his works.
“Then someone from America told me I could make oil from it, and I said, really, I can make oil? So I started to make oil,” he says. But of course, it wasn’t quite as simple at the time.
Today, he says, he knows “everything about coconuts – I am crazy about coconuts”, but making refined oil was a long learning process that involved a donated machine and a lot of trial and error.
And no sooner had he perfected his coconut oil game, that another friend suggested he try making soap, another slow learning process in the age before the Internet. A friend agreed to join the enterprise as a financial backer, and so, six years ago, he launched the Les Artisans Lao line of
skincare and fragrance products. It was perfect timing, with the ever-growing trend of natural alternatives to commercial skin products, and a clamour among well-heeled tourists to take home the perfect classy souvenirs as gifts from Laos.
“We’re really careful with packaging – we have many products coming out every few months, but when we make a new product, we have to wait for six months or one year to see how the stability is,” he says.
“Our formula is very precise and we are very careful. I say to people, if it’s not correct, if you make a mistake, throw it away and make it again…From when you create until you go to the market it takes maybe one year and a half or two years.”
Indeed, exclusivity could be one of the company’s main selling points, beyond being naturally sourced and ethically produced. Saada has so far declined to export the products, fearing a dilution of quality if demand grows too high. In this way, the products are the very definition of sustainable – not to mention desirable.
Today, Saada employs around 25 people – all Lao and non-English-speaking – and the products are sold everywhere in Laos’s main cities, from small handicrafts shops to international minimarts and large-scale supermarkets. And, to Saada’s surprise, his biggest market is Chinese and Korean consumers, many of whom buy the products in large quantities, safe in the knowledge that they’re sourced on a small scale in Laos, and can’t be bought elsewhere.
Visit artisanslao.com for more information.
Originally Published in: Champa Meuanglao
Latest Updates From the Luang Prabang Film Festival 2018
The Luang Prabang Film Festival (LPFF) has announced that its ninth annual event will take place on 7-12 December 2018. The festival, which celebrates Southeast Asian cinema every December in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Luang Prabang, Laos, will feature a range of feature film screenings, short film programs, public discussions, and events.
This year’s Spotlight will focus on the Indonesian film industry. Curated by KOLEKTIF Project Manager Gayatri Nadya, the program will offer audiences a full day of programming and lively discussion from leading Indonesian film experts and filmmakers. Recent years have seen a cinematic resurgence from this territory as it opens to more foreign investors, builds more theatres, and continuously breaks its own box office records. New and exciting Indonesian talent has emerged, making a notable impact on the international festival circuit with a fresh vision that has won high praise from critics and audiences alike.
This December, LPFF will bring to the screen a strong selection of these films, exposing audiences to some of the best examples of this new wave of creativity from Indonesia.
Along with the announcement of the festival’s dates, LPFF has also released the visual identity for this year’s festival, which takes inspiration from vintage travel posters in support of Visit Laos Year 2018. The main design features a chic Southeast Asian filmmaker location scouting in Luang Prabang during the festival. Once again, this concept was executed by the very talented Manilla Chounlamountri, Art Director of the Vientiane-based MeIdea Full Service Agency.
“We feel a lot of pressure to top our previous years’ graphics, and we’re confident that our designer has, somehow, accomplished it once again,” said Festival Director Gabriel Kuperman. “I love all the references within the visual- you have the throwback travel poster feel, the empowered female filmmaker (that we see many of at our event), the backdrop of this gorgeous little town with its mixture of traditional Lao and colonial French architecture, and of course, there’s our intimate festival stuck in there so naturally.”
Last year’s festival welcomed over 22,000 attendees to its screenings, Q&As with filmmakers, panel discussions, and live performances that go beyond the screen to include dance, theater, and live music. This year’s audiences are expected to grow even larger, as the Luang Prabang Film Festival solidifies itself as one of the largest international events in Laos, and one of the most important film events in the region.
However, despite its size, LPFF manages to maintain the intimacy that attendees have grown to love. At the 2017 festival, 23 of the festival’s 32 feature films had directors or producers on hand to speak to audiences after screenings of their films, both in groups and one-on-one.
LPFF has also made its mark in the region in regards to its Southeast Asian artist development programs. Last year’s Talent Lab, led by the Tribeca Film Institute®, provided training on grantwriting and project pitching to ten different projects from around the region. After an open pitch forum, Raising a Beast, written and directed by the Lao filmmaker Xaisongkham Induangchanthy, and produced by Filipina Abigail Lazaro, was selected by a jury to attend the TFI Network Market at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival®. Hosted annually by TFI, the industry market gives filmmakers the opportunity to build connections with a wide range of industry insiders who can potentially help them advance their projects. TFI set up dozens of meetings with producers, post-production houses, editors, and financiers for the Raising a Beast team, and will also mentor them through the completion of their project. All participants in last year’s Talent Lab will also receive preferential consideration for any of TFI’s grants. This Talent Lab will take place again at December’s festival, and will be expanded to three days.
Additionally, LPFF will hold a masterclass on screenwriting, as well as a weeklong workshop on animation, organized in partnership with the American Film Showcase.
All festival events are open to the public and free of charge, and visitors can go easily between the main venues on foot or via LPFF’s complimentary tuk-tuk shuttle service.
LPFF is funded by corporate sponsors, non-governmental organizations, embassies, and private donors.
To stay up-to-date on the Luang Prabang Film Festival and its activities, follow the project on Facebook (www.facebook.com/lpfilmfest) or visit its website (www.lpfilmfest.org).
US-Based Filmmaker Raises Funds for Feature Documentary on the Secret War in Laos
Filmmaker and Pulitzer fellow Erin McGoff is currently running a 30-day Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to help raise part of $37,000 to finish her ambitious documentary featuring the secret bombing campaign in Laos, which was the scene of an intense yet clandestine proxy war during the Vietnam Conflict.
McGoff has brought on two-time Emmy-Award winning composer Jeremy Zuckerman to score the film. She also plans to tour the film all of 2019 in the hopes of educating more Americans about Laos and sparking a national conversation.
The fundraising campaign will end on July 6th at midnight. This film has been supported by The Pulitzer Center, NextPix, and World Without Mines. As of the writing of this article, the Indigogo campaign is currently 62% funded with $9,240 USD raised by 71 backers.
During the Vietnam War, the United States secretly bombed Laos more heavily per capita than any country in history, and 80 million unexploded bombs continue to terrorize, kill and maim innocent Lao people today.
But McGoff saw a bigger story here: the humanity of the Lao people. They are resilient, optimistic, and kind – and she showcases this in her upcoming feature film, This Little Land of Mines.
For more information on this documentary, please check out its following social media presences:
Instagram: thislittlelandofmines
Twitter: @littlelandmines
Facebook: This Little Land of Mines
The Best of Laos
A country could tell its whole story through food, if only it knew how.
When Latsamy Vetsaphong first heard a western friend wondering aloud where they could buy some of the amazing delicacies they had tried while in Laos, she realised there was a gap in the market for Lao souvenirs.
And when she heard yet another friend lamenting that some of the food she had gathered to take home to relatives wasn’t nicely packaged, she knew she was onto something.
“I heard people saying that Laos didn’t export anything but timber and handicrafts,” she says.
“This was more than five years ago. I thought to myself, okay, what can I do to help?”
She decided to focus on some of the the country’s unique foods, using comments from her foreigner friends as a guide.
“Let’s say when they go to Luang Prabang, what do they like to buy? Quite often it’s riverweed, the famous one with sesame seeds,” she says.
But it wasn’t just foreigners who were picking up food as gifts for the family back home.
“I think even in Laos, locals still don’t know what food is available from north to south,” she says.
“Laos may be a small country, but people don’t realise how diverse the food is here. Northerners are often unfamiliar with specific southern ingredients.”
Through her new business, Lao Best, she has begun selecting what she believes is the best of the country’s products to sell in her shop, from small plantation coffee and wild honey, to riverweed and fish sauce. And with a career in the import and export trade under her belt, she has learned over the years what works.
“With the right packaging and presentation, we can tell our story all over the world – why we eat the way we do, and how we make our food,” she says.
The shop has been open just two months at the time of writing, and Ms Latsamy already has plans to open more branches outside of Vientiane – one in every province, if she has her way.
She has also started selling products to local minimarts, including Thai chainstore Jiffy, and hopes foreign shoppers will soon catch on to how easy it is to pick up well-packaged foods to take home.
She also plans, ultimately, to export the products through Lao Best, although not all of the foodstuffs will be successful on the international market.
“We’re now testing the market, to see what foods can be exported,” she says.
“An example is Lao jerky. Dried meat is eaten all over the world, and we have our version from Savannakhet, made from pork and beef. We just have to work how to export it, and where it would sell best.”
But she also wants to educate her own people about what her country has to offer. One thing she has noted during the process of identifying the best foods is that many producers of food and handicrafts have benefited from sporadic assistance – both technical and in marketing terms – from non-government organisations. The assistance, while welcome, is often non-ongoing, and projects are often left to flounder.
“They know the help won’t go on forever, but they often don’t know what to do next,” she says.
“They need someone to come in and encourage them to continue to produce their products, and guide them with their marketing. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
For the moment, though, she is focused on growing the business and expanding its list of products and urges anyone who wants to become involved to contact Lao Best on Facebook.
Originally Published in: Champa Meuanglao
Singapore Restaurant Sells Thai Food, Misspells Lao Name
Un-Yang-Kor-Dai, a concept from the Thai city of Khao Yai, has recently opened an outlet in Chinatown in South Bridge Road, Singapore.
While its brand positioning is understandably geared towards serving authentic Thai or Isan cuisine, its restaurant name is written in the standard language of Laos, where Isan culture derives a historical commonality. However, the Lao spelling is quite peculiar as there is an apparent discrepancy between the original text in Lao script and its English transliteration, one that would not have been overlooked by an average Lao person.
Although it is common that Thais in the Northeastern Isan region of Thailand may speak and understand Lao language, many do not have full command of the Lao script. This misspelling demonstrates either a lack of awareness regarding the differences between modern Thai and Lao languages, or an uninformed approach that makes the assumption that nobody will notice – or care. While Singaporeans may be linguistically none the wiser, there are seven million Lao (and counting) who regularly travel to both Singapore and Thailand, who could possibly be irritated by this blunder concerning the use of their language.
With signature dishes such as the PenLaos Signature Grilled Chicken, Korat-Style Fried Rice Noodles with chicken. The al dente dry noodles are fried on the spot, with a potpourri of Thai chilli paste, fish sauce, bean sprouts and chives.
The restaurant, which adopts an open-kitchen concept and is decorated with community artworks and handicrafts, also makes three special sauces by hand: Isaan Spicy Dipping Sauce, Special Spicy Sauce and Sweet and Sour Sauce. The first sauce is paired with the Isaan Beef Tenderloin Steak for a spicy kick.
Other dishes include Tom Yum Kung Num Kon with fresh prawns and coconut milk, Fresh Crab With Red Curry Sauce, Steamed Whole Sea Bass In Spicy Lime Sauce, Phad Thai Tom Yum With Seafood, and Grilled Pork Neck.
Location: 01-02, 57 South Bridge Road
Opening Hours: 11am to 3pm and 6 to 10pm (Tuesdays to Sundays)
Info: Call 6787-8575, e-mail letseat@unyangkordai.com or go to www.unyangkordai.com
