Worldly Desires
One of three films commissioned by the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2005. A couple escaped their family to look for a spiritual tree in the jungle. There is a song at night, a song that spoke about an innocent idea of love and a quest for happiness. Worldly Desires is an experimental project where I invited a filmmaker friend, Pimpaka Towira, to shoot the love story by day and the song by night. The story, Deep Red Bloody Night, was written by my assistant who wanted to reprise a forbidden love story in a more romantic time in the past. I picked a pop song, Will I be Lucky? to convey a sense of guiltless freedom one feels when being hit by love. The video is a little simulation of manners, dedicated to the memories of filmmaking in the jungle during the year 2001-2005. -Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Pimpaka Towira
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 Pimpaka Towira
A young soldier stationed in the troubled southern Thai region is on his annual leave to his village in northern Thailand. Upon his return, he finds out that his girlfriend has now settled down with a new Western lover. Blaming the situation on the military career he has chosen for himself, he starts to get angry with her and everyone around him. His sister reminds him that forgiveness is not as difficult as he imagines, but that it has to start from within.
Masterfully filmed, atmospheric moment. The period of mourning comes to an end at a temple-like funeral chapel. The final visitors are not mourners, but want to buy off their guilt. The mother wants to see a real confession. And money. The intense emotionality the death of a child evokes is, as it were, sculpted in space while the tension between the mother and the visitors is captured more subliminally by a roving camera.
The Truth Be Told is an epic-scale documentary that follows three and half years in the life of Supinya, a media activist who was sued by the Shin Corporation for stating that the company had benefited from the policies of the administration of Thaksin Shinawatra, whose family owned the company. The documentary is snapshot of a turbulent period in Thai politics, from the Thaksin years, the anti-Thaksin backlash that arose after Thaksin sold his share in Shin to Singapore's Temasek Holdings, and the military coup that ousted Thaksin.
This short movie that is maybe not a documentary is made by the filmmaker in memory of the extrajudicial killing of young Lahu activist Chaiyapoom PASAE. She knew the young Lahu boy through a workshop she gave some years before he was killed. A tribute to a young aspiring filmmaker and his Lahu language and culture.
Laila sets out on a road trip to Pattani, one of the three southernmost Thai provinces, to visit her long-lost aunt. Her brother and his friend are tagging along. The three take off from Bangkok during a time when the capital is going through radical conflict. Being from the city has prevented them from realizing much about the violent outbreaks that have been occurring around Pattani for many years. Meeting a suspicious soldier sent to fight the insurgents, the four head together to find Laila's aunt, where the route is leading them to discover a land stranger than that they are familiar with.
Two women face one another. Two worlds touch. Past and presence. The young woman warns the older woman. Something terrible will happen. The older woman massages the general. She knows the general’s secret. She wanders through empty rooms. Rooms coated with a patina of secrecy. The warning hangs in the air. The young woman doesn’t have a chance. Towira’s films are characterised by a fusion of stylisation and realism. She holds a mirror to reality, a mirror that is closely related to the country’s history.
The film follows the life of Sipang (Nicole Theriault), an urbane and self-confident Bangkok woman whose husband disappears after he receives a mysterious phone call on the night of their wedding. She begins to search for him with the help of his elder brother Chatchai (Pongpat Wachirabunjong) and his introverted wife Busaba (Siriyakone Pukkavesa), a traditional housewife totally dependent on her dominating husband. During the search, Sipang and Busaba, who are worlds apart in outlook, grow increasingly close and explore the value of life, love and devotion as women living in contemporary Thai society.
A man is depressed after returning from a political protest.
Inspired by the case of enforced disappearance of an ethnic Karen activist Porlajee Rakchongcharoen (a.k.a. Billy) who went missing in Thailand near Kaeng Krachan National Park in Petchaburi province, 100 miles (161 km) south of Bangkok. Park authorities arrested the Karen activist on April 17, 2014 for possessing a wild honeycomb and six bottles of wild honey but released him after giving a warning. He disappeared shortly afterward.