Anocha Suwichakornpong
Produced by the Luang Prabang Film Festival, "MEKONG 2030" is a collection of short narrative films that envision the future of the Mekong River from five different national and cultural perspectives. Set in the year 2030, they aim to both entertain and inspire audiences to actively protect this critical life source.
Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.
Aoey seeks the Pak Nam Po River - believed to reach heaven - in order to send her mother, who recently passed away, to the afterworld. Early in the morning, she boards a boat with her father, other family members, and an old friend who is now a monk.
Rivers and Suwichakornpong’s first collaboration, commissioned by the 2018 Thai Biennale.
A tour guide and also a hotel rep automated voice, Kanya, leads her foreign guest, Alex, through a beach town in the east of Thailand called Bangsaen. Since Kanya's presentation is overtly aestheticized and strictly regimented, Alex decides to explore the town by himself, fantasizing to get out of the frame.
A film director and her muse who was a student activist in the 1970s, a waitress who keeps changing jobs, an actor and an actress, all live loosely connected to each other by almost invisible threads. The narrative sheds its skin several times to reveal layer upon layer of the complexities that make up the characters’ lives.
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.
This film juxtaposes two kinds of documentary images, shown in parallel with each other: tourist footage from Myanmar of locals practising traditional handicrafts as a tourist attraction; and, the filmmaker’s recordings of the real, harsh handiwork of Myanmar workers turning coconut husks into fibre at a factory in a Thai town close to the Myanmar border.
Lublae is a district in northern Thailand that used to be known as the 'hidden' land, due to its remote location ('lub' means 'hidden' in Thai). Others say that Lublae is a derivative of Lublang, the name of the forest in the area. 'Lang' means 'evening' in the language of Lanna (an old kingdom in present day northern Thailand) as the forest was so dense it often got dark before sunset. Legend has it that the residents of Lublae were all women and that they tolerated no lies, no matter how small.
“The age of dejection.” This is how Director Lee Chatametikool remembers Thailand in 1997. Concrete Cloud is a film that tells us about the young men who survived an era of financial crisis. Mutt, who is working as a stockbroker in the United States, must suddenly return home when his father commits suicide. After the funeral, he runs into his old girlfriend, Sai. Meanwhile his younger brother Nic falls in love with Poupee, a schoolmate and neighbor. None of the relationships come easy, however. Each is harboring a secret and there is a big gap between dreams and reality. What links them together are memories—but memories alone cannot hold their relationships together in the face of harsh realities. As the characters in the film remember their pasts, the director ruminates on his own recollections of 1997, hence the scenes reminiscent of a ’90s music video. Overall, this film is really about time.
Nuhm is a construction foreman working in Bangkok. The political instability in Thailand has making its presence felt in all business sectors. Nuhm suddenly finds himself out of jobs. He decides to leave Bangkok to go back to his hometown in the northeast of Thailand to attend his high school friend’s wedding during the Thai New Year in April -- which also happens to be the hottest month of the year. Nuhm reunites with his old friends at the wedding in Khon Kaen.
This short video is set in Mahachai, a town less than an hour away from Bangkok known for its seafood processing industry. The town, geographically situated by the river, is the site of many factories and has the highest number of Burmese workers outside of Burma. It is estimated that as many as 300,000 Burmese reside in Mahachai. Most of the Burmese are working, both legally and illegally, in these factories. Just like any other day in Mahachai, Wawa Kai, a Burmese immigrant worker wakes up. She brushes her teeth and takes a cold shower. She goes to work at a factory where she grades squids and shrimps according to their sizes. But today she is not feeling well, and has to take the afternoon off.
Helmed by three female directors, this omnibus features three films set in China, Thailand and Singapore respectively. Each story occurs at a specific mealtime, and seeks to interpret the frailties and complexities of love through different Asian perspectives. All three stories are tethered with the question, "Will you marry me?" Mirroring the repasts themselves, Breakfast and Dinner are heavier in tone, while Lunch is light with a sprinkle of humor.
Explores the relationship between Ake, a young man who is paralyzed from the waist down after an accident, and Pun, the male nurse who takes care of him, and of course Ake's father. Ake is at first cold towards his nurse Pun, but as Pun continues to earnestly take care of him he starts to open up his heart through candid conversations. The physical contact with Pun makes him rethink physical desires that he wants to forget. The grudge he held against his father slowly abates. All of this slowly becomes the motivating factor to confirm that he is alive, albeit with physical problems.
