Short Films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Program #3 - October 21 at 8:00pm

Films Include:

thirdworld, 1997, 16mm transferred to DCP, black and white, sound, 17 min

1. It was like wondering…

2. …whether it was a boy or a girl.

3. There was another scary story… my brother’s son.

4. He was like a lump of meat, the size of a rat…

5. ,with a baby’s head.

6. His limbs were mashed together like a ball of chopped pork.

7. He might have been a premature-delivery.

8. No, he wasn’t born yet.

9. It seemed like we could see how old he was,

10. …like now he’s three months old…

11. We could see him develop on this plate.

12. A dinner plate?

13. (Title)---- thirdworld

14. My friends were going to a concert.

15. So they went out to shop for clothes, luxurious clothes.

16. Your friends over there?

17. Yes, I wore suit, but with shorts.

18. Didn’t match, did it?

19. What a character!

20. Why didn’t they go to the concert?

21. They were going to go,

22. , but my clothes were wrong for the occasion.

23. So you couldn’t go?

24. Not really…

25. Then there was one guy threw a bowling ball…downtown.

26. He held that white ball.

27. Where was the town?

28. Probably not abroad, maybe Thailand.

29. It might have been some place that was a mixture of places…

30. like my dream last night.

Empire, 2010, 35mm transferred to DCP, colour, sound, 2 min

Empire is a film about searching and finding. As the camera feels its way along the walls of a cave or grotto, we see a diver wearing a gleaming white helmet and a hand diving into the sand to pick up some shells, playfully sliding them through his fingers. The images are accompanied by a polyphonic roaring, hammering and rattling. Has the diver been looking for something and has someone else found it?

My Mother’s Garden, 2007, DCP, colour, silent, 7 min

The film is an impression of a Jewelry collection by Victoire de Castellane. The pieces in the collection are inspired by various types of dangerous flowers and carnivorous plants. Each piece has a hidden mechanical movement. Most of the film’s image comprise of extreme close-up shots of the jewelries. The film is also a tribute to a garden of the filmmaker’s mother, with wild orchid’s roots, bugs and various organisms.

I often took a refuge in the orchid house when the heat was unbearable. The shades and shadows inside made the air cool and the earth smell like rain. The rocks were soft as they were covered with green moss. The ground was filled with burned chaff that looked like black sand. There were armies of black ants and white termites who ruled the ground. Nearby, the grasshoppers camouflaged themselves in the bushes of Chinese Rose. In the evening, a German Shepherd barked incessantly as my mother walked home. The smoke was creeping from the back kitchen. The rows of orchids’ gray roots were touching my head as I was walking towards the exit. The roots were tentacles that absorbed the visitors’ memories and fed them to the flowers above. Dinnertime arrived with the setting sun. The orchid flowers stood poised, digesting the recollections of the day.

February 17, 2007

Ghost of Asia, collaboration with Christelle Lheureux, 2005, DCP, colour, sound, 9 min

A collaboration between two film-makers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Christelle Lheureux, taking the recent tsunami in Asia as its starting point. The directors 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. By projecting their own ideas on to this ghostly creature, half real, half imagined, the children’s fantasies are given real substance, their childish game mediated by the adult ‘game’ of shooting a film. – 2005 Andrea Viliani/ Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea.

Monsoon, 2011, phone camera and computer camera transferred to DCP, colour, sound, 3 min

Monsoon is a video response to the earthquake and the tsunami which hit the Tohoku region of Japan on 11 March 2011

A man is Skyping to the other side of the world. He discovers a firefly and shows it to his partner.

This video is a lullaby for a monsoon night, for a loved one far away, and for an empty field outside the window.

Luminous People, 2007, Super 8 transferred to DCP, colour, sound, 15 min

Luminous People is a recreation of an event to commemorate the presence of the dead and the decayed memories of the living, of filmmaking.

Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival (Quinzaine des réalisateurs), 16 – 27 May 2007, as part of the omnibus film O Estado do Mundo / The State of the World commissioned by The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, to mark its 50th Anniversary. 

Nimit, 2007, HD, colour, sound, 16 min

I remember the simplicity and the value of goodness – that of happiness such as waiting with my mother before the sky turned orange to give alms for the monks, or walking silently in the orchid garden, or watching the stars at night.

Inside our house there was a calendar with an image of the king. It was by the door for ones to see when entering the house. Years later, we moved to a new house, a concrete one. The king followed with a new calendar year, a new design, and a new kind of paper. In retrospect, he remains a fixture that relates to time. Somehow the familiar image of the bespectacled man is still linked with the lights of my childhood years. Other than that, I only know him through various images and stories from the news, presumably much of those were approved and issued by the Palace. They contain a different kind of value – a more polished one. Through the years, the physical quality of these images has been transformed – from the grainy analog video to a hi-definition digital format. Obviously the technology miraculously rids the artefacts and makes the images clearer. But the more polished the value, the more it manifests its opacity.

In the early 2007, The Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, under the Ministry of Culture contacted me to make a moving image about the king. For me, the king never changes despite the rage of the passing calendar years that brought about many changes in Thailand’s landscape. But at the end of the day I asked myself, “Who is this man?” Can I make a movie “about” him? Do I assume that the information I have learned through the years can constitute a movie?

After much pondering, I decided to make a film on the subject that I know of: my life - my mother, my nephew, my niece, my brother, my sister, my lover, my dog, my room, my favourite landscapes, and other things including my light.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

July 9, 2007

Blue, 2018, DCP, colour, sound, 12.16 min

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Primitive project), 2009, colour, sound, 18 min

In Nabua in December 2008, I located several houses that I thought would be suitable as Uncle Boonmee’s house in the proposed feature film. This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee.

The film is comprised of shots of the houses’ interiors in the evening. They are all deserted except one house with a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film.