Short Films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Program #4 - October 28 at 8:00pm

Films Include:

This and a Million More Lights, 2003, Digital to DCP, colour, silent, 1 min

A strobing fluorescent light inter-cuts scenes from an urban swimming pool; a young boy tempts the water.

This and a Million More Lights is one of several one-minute artists’ videos made for the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s 46664: Give 1 Minute of Art to AIDS campaign.

Malee and the Boy, 1999, Digital to DCP, colour, sound, 27 min

Originally called Malee and the Boy and His Microphone and a Hungry Satan, this is a collaborative project dealing with image/sound apparatus. The subject is a 10 year-old boy who is in charge of the microphone. He roams to places around Bangkok to gather sounds for the video. The sound indicates the direction he headed during the filming and displays his point of interests. The filmmaker is in charge of the image, film roughly along at the boy’s locations. The narrative of the film, presented in texts, is taken from a Thai comic book available around the place of the filming. This faces and places documentation can be viewed as a one-afternoon diary of a day out in Bangkok.

Nokia Short, 2003, Nokia phone transferred to DCP, colour, sound, 2 min

Shot on a mobile phone and funded by Nokia, Thailand to promote their first phone with integrated camera.

Ablaze, 2016, HD, colour, sound, 5 min

A moving painting, brushed with black shadows on white. A man and a woman standing in the dark wood. They’re looking for something but the man blocks the woman's vision. A mysterious blaze is burning bright, but she will not be able to see.

Commissioned by the National Gallery Singapore.

Mekong Hotel, 2012, HD to DCP, colour, sound, 56 min

Mekong Hotel is a portrait of a hotel near the Mekong River in the north-east of Thailand. The river there marks the border between Thailand and Laos. The film shuffles different realms, fact and fiction, expressing the bonds between a vampire-like mother and her daughter, the young lovers and the river. Mekong Hotel - since it was shot at the time of the heavy flooding in Thailand - also weaves in layers of demolition, politics, and a drifting dream of the future.