Ten Years Thailand
A collection of short films by five Thai directors imagining their country ten years into the future.
Wisit Sasanatieng
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Aditya Assarat
Chulayarnnon Siriphol
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Wisit Sasanatieng
Soon after a mysterious-ritual ceremony has been performed in a house, there are several chilling and inexplicable events happening which allegedly relate to haunting-spirit possession influencing house members into violence.
Follow the life of Pod as he moves to Bangkok from the country. Pod's new life starts with getting a job, losing a finger and dreaming about a girl. A movie were nothing is impossible, and just because you get killed by raining red helmets doesn't mean you have to stop driving a motorcycle taxi.
Set in 1934 Siam, the story involves a young pregnant woman named Nualjin who's searching for her missing husband. She comes to stay in the spooky rural mansion of a widow, Runjuan.
Camellia is a collection of 3 short films: Love for Sale, Kamome and Iron Pussy.
Year 2016, Bangkok is a rotten capital infested with chaos and criminals. Widespread corruption by politicians has dipped the moral compass to a new low, and the government's hasty plan to construct a nuclear power plant has spread fears among villagers and enivironmental activists. Amidst the mood of despair, a hero emerges. He goes after filthy politicians and vile criminals, handing out his own brand of justice when the law fails to fuction. No one knows his true identity. Every time he kills, he leaves a name card which says: The Red Eagle. But Red Eagle is a hunter who's also being hunted. An assassin, called Black Devil, has been sent by a crime lord to kill him. As his past returns to haunt him, the tortured hero is facing a conflict that will decide not just his own destiny, but the destiny of his entire nation.
A homage and parody of 1950s and 1960s Thai romantic melodramas and action films. Dum, the son of a peasant falls in love with Rumpoey, the daughter of a wealthy and respected family. The star-crossed lovers are torn apart for years, but their forbidden love survives. When tragedy strikes, Dum unleashes his rage and becomes the gun-slinging outlaw the "Black Tiger" who will stop at nothing to seek his revenge.
Thai directors give their take on Thailand's capital city of Bangkok. 1. Bangkok Blues 2. Bangkok Stories 3. I Love Bangkok 4. Lost but not Forgotten 5. Maha Nakorn 6. Pi Makham 7. Sightseeing 8. Silence 9. Sisters
An outcast weirdo at a Catholic girls' boarding school. She has a special nose. Unlike the kid in The Sixth Sense, the olfactorily gifted girl Mon (Ploychompoo Jannine Weigel) can't see dead people, she smells them. More specifically, she can sniff out the troubled spirits who are still lurking in our realm. Her unique talent leads her to develop a connection with a boy ghost (Bom Phongsakon Tosuwan) who was a student when the place was a business school in the 1980s, before it was a church convent. Together, they investigate a murder that occurred there some 50 years before, when the school was the palace home of a princess, who was found beaten, bloodied and very much dead in her swimming pool. Her gardener took the fall for the death, but there was more to the case than met the eye.
Also Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
A fluorescent tube illuminates an empty playground in the evening. Nearby a flash of light is projected on a makeshift screen. This outdoor movie is a portrait of a village repeatedly struck by lightning. As night falls, the silhouette figures of young men emerge, they are playing with a football raging with fire. They take turns kicking the ball which leaves illuminated trails in the grass. The lightning on the screen flickers amid the fire and the smoke rising from the ground. The game intensifies with each kick that sends the fireball soaring into the air. Finally the teens burn the screen and crowd around it to witness the blazing canvas, behind which is revealed the ghostly white beam of a projector. Phantoms of Nabua is part of the multi-platform Primitive project which focuses on a concept of remembrance and extinction and is set in the northeast of Thailand.
0116643225059 is an early experimental film by Weerasethakul made during his time at SAIC. The work is about a long-distance telephone conversation between the filmmaker and his beloved mother in Khon Kaen, Thailand. Weerasethakul superimposed a photograph of his mother in her youth alongside his own image and his apartment in Chicago. It renders a strong bond between the artist and his family.
Taking the recent tsunami in Asia as its starting point, the filmmakers have used the idea of a ghost seen wandering along the rocky coastline of a Thai island and, in a life-affirming gesture, they have invited some local children to direct the film for them, suggesting and filming the movements of the actor-ghost.
Created in celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, this short essay centres on a monologue delivered by a reincarnation of the philosopher in twenty-first century Thailand.
The work is part of the Memoria Project, the first major series of work that is set outside of Weerasethakul’s home country. Given his affinity for the Amazon, of which Thai jungle tales were originally inspired, Weerasethakul has started to explore South America - and since 2017, has been developing a film based in Colombia. He is drawn to its topography, where active volcanoes and landslides ceaselessly transform natural landscapes. The Memoria Project presents both personal and collective memories, while retaining the artist’s fascination with illumination. A vital part of the video and photographic works is the presence of a lone protagonist on the beach. Weerasethakul worked with Canadian actor Connor Jessup who visited him during the filming of a documentary at Nuquí area in Chocó Department, western Colombia. Here, the actor is a spirit that contemplates the artist’s journey, his dream of both real and imaginary films.
Petch, one of the young men of Nabua, composes and plays this song about his village. One evening, he sang a song to Weerasethakul’s film crew regarding an August event when the former members of the Communist Party of Thailand gathered to commemorate the first shoot out in the field more than 45 years ago. Weerasethakul layers Petch’s song with an image of his friend, Kamgiang, whose grandfather was killed by the soldiers in the field not far from his home.
Invisibility displays Weerasethakul’s continued interest in the issue of perception and memory. The installation takes threads from his recent films, Cemetery of Splendor and Fever Room, both of which feature the same actors. Here, he takes them deeper into an imaginary world and ponders the future of shared consciousness. The videos depict a landscape where the protagonists are confined to a room, along with the viewers. With no way out, they infiltrate each other’s dreams. Invisibility mirrors the troubled state of Thailand’s politics. It proposes a decayed vision of the future where one needs to constantly evade reality. The viewing experience shifts between seeing and not seeing, fact and fiction, space and void.
For a Fiery Monkey Year.
In this video diary, Weerasethakul documents the set of Primitive Project in Nabua, Thailand, particularly the scene when teenagers are hypnotized and sleep inside a time machine.
Cactus River is a diary of the time Apichatpong Weerasethakul visited a newlywed couple near the Mekong River.
Also Directed by Aditya Assarat
Beat goes to the public swimming pool on Sukhumvit to spy on Pat and Paula. He has had a crush on Pat since freshman year of university. But she has a boyfriend who is on the national football team and has never given Beat much thought. But the day is long and the sun is hot. Maybe today will be different from all the rest. A short film about the kids down the street.
In a remote Thai village, a man gets a call informing him that his son died in a crash. He needs to bring the body back and give a decent funeral, but he can't afford to do both.
Ananda has returned home from abroad. Unsure of his career plans, he accepts an invitation to act in a new movie for a famous director. During the filming in a small seaside town, Zoe, his American girlfriend from University, arrives for a week-long visit. But the change of country takes its toll and she soon becomes frustrated with the situation. Meanwhile, Ananda meets another girl on the beach...
3 Friends is an experimental fiction/documentary film conceived and directed by 3 friends.
In this omnibus film, six directors from the region each reflect on the Chinese diaspora. Thai filmmaker Aditya Assarat describes a meeting in Thailand between Paula and her friends, who have Chinese roots, with her cousin Mumu, who was born in China; Royston Tan from Singapore tells of the special meaning that making the traditional Popiah dish has for a Chinese family; Midi Zhao from Myanmar follows the death of a grandfather surrounded by Chinese customs in a village in Myanmar; Sun Koh from Singapore makes a small-scale comedy about the commercialisation of the local radio station, influenced by mainland China; Tan Chui Mui from Malaysia composes a poetic, visual reflection on being an outsider and wandering; and Tsai Ming-liang, also born in Malaysia, observes the seventh-storey apartment in which he grew up as a child.
Takua Pa is a small town in the South of Thailand. Ever since the tsunami, people have lost their jobs and remember better times in the past. One day a stranger comes to town. His name is Ton, he is an architect. He rents a room in a small hotel owned by Na. They begin to have a secret love affair. The town finds out about it, people are bored and angry. And now they have found an enemy, a person they can blame. Wit is Na's younger brother, the town gang leader. He loves his sister but cannot bear to see another person's happiness. He is the one that will lead the town to destroy this stranger.
The Scala opened its doors in 1970. It had one thousand seats and every night, they were filled. In those days, going to the movies was something special. The cinema was a place where people got dressed up, went on dates, and fell in love. But today, everything has changed. There is a multiplex in every mall and the young generation watch movies on their phone. But at The Scala, time has stood still. The cinema is still run by many of the same staff who have been there from the beginning. It is now the last remaining standalone cinema left in Bangkok. And soon, its time will come to an end too.
Louis and his girlfriend Fern are on the rocks. He finds some secret messages she left hidden in the pages of his books. Louis drags his best friend Ananda over to Fern's apartment to confront her. He doesn't want to keep finding these messages years after they have broken up. But that is precisely why she left them there. A short film about preserving old memories.
The film features six themes of love in Bangkok's famous districts: Mo Chit, Yaowarat, Khaosan, Phahurat, Silom, and Sukhumvit on the hand of six different directors: Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Soraya Nakasuwan, Vorakorn Ruetaivanichkul, Aditya Assarat and Wichanon Somunjarn.
Auntie Nid's legs hurt. Kane stops by visiting. He is bringing her something. Something amazing.
Also Directed by Chulayarnnon Siriphol
Banned at the Thailand Biennale Krabi 2018, this film is based on the history of Khao Kha Nab Nam, Krabi. Filled with fantasy and historical facts, it treads the line between fiction and folklore.
Short film directed by Chulayarnnon Siriphol.
In 2013, the filmmaker’s ownership of a work was revoked by his commissioners. In response, he distributed 100 copies of the award certificate and re-rendered the film 100 times on DVD, the quality of each successive version increasingly degraded until the original work became unrecognisable. Each DVD was sold as an edition of the film for 100 baht. The performance is compared to the replacement of the Khana Ratsadon plaque—a symbol of democracy in Thailand — with a royalist plaque after it mysteriously vanishes. But it is resurrected in various guises and contexts, including the aforementioned DVD. By destabilising the notion of authenticity, this tongue-in- cheek docufiction embraces meaning-making from below as resistance in a totalitarian regime.
An adaptation of Sri Burapha (Kulap Saipradit)'s 1937 influential Thai novel, Behind the Painting. Forget Me Not is an attempt to reread the novel and also reread Thai political history at the same time.