Apichatpong Weerasethakul — Director (76)

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Fiction (2018)
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night-time, fluorescent lamps buzzing and scuttling insects a hand writing in a blank book, writing and attempting to record a dream. The image envelopes the viewer, the projection plays on all surfaces insects, hand and lights slide across the floor dream and reality collide.

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未定名阿彼察邦·韦拉斯哈古科幻新片项目 (2024)
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Apichatpong revealed he plans to head to Sri Lanka to shoot his next film and he may be partnering with a streamer for the film. With plans to do some location-scouting starting this month, he hopes this new project will be “more free” than his last one. “This time, I want it to be more flexible. It’ll be a smaller budget, and probably with [my longtime actors] Jenjira [Pongpas] and Sakda [Kaewbuadee],” he said, hoping to not have a strict list of things to shoot each day. “It’s the same old gang.” As for his inspirations, he’s looking toward sci-fi author and 2001: A Space Odyssey co-writer Arthur C. Clarke. “He lived and died in Sri Lanka, and one of his books, The Fountains of Paradise, is set in a fictional land based on a Sri Lankan landscape,” the director said. The novel, released in 1979, was set in the 22nd century and followed a visionary scientist who “conceives the most grandiose engineering project of all time, and one which will revolutionize the future of humankind in space: a Space Elevator, 36,000 kilometers high, anchored to an equatorial island in the Indian Ocean.” While it’s unclear if he would be drawing direct inspiration from the novel, with Memoria‘s (spoiler?) sci-fi twist, it would be fascinating to see the director head further down this path. Apichatpong also said “another source of inspiration was an article written by a Thai woman who went there on a religious pilgrimage. She speaks about climbing a holy mountain, the same one that inspired Clarke’s story, so I’m going to go check it out.” Speaking of its length, it may be his longest project yet. “I wrote a treatment for a three- or four-hour movie, just from my imagination, from what I dream about,” he said. “When you talk about 90 minutes, it’s a comfortable length. The human attention span is 90 minutes, and the dream cycle is also 90 minutes. To make it longer is like a challenge: how to create a journey where you don’t feel trapped by this human, biological requirement.” Lastly, the Uncle Boonmee director revealed what we’ve all been waiting for: his thoughts on James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water. “It’s so simple, right? It’s such a classic storyline, there’s no innovation there, but the technology is amazing,” he said. “In other movies that are completely computer-generated, you can feel there’s something missing, whereas in this one you are able to identify. The characters have those very big eyes, they’re like babies. It’s a mass market product, and I admire that aspect which only Hollywood can do.”

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30/30 Vision: 3 Decades of Strand Releasing (2019)
30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing IMDb TMDB Douban
格雷格·阿拉基 / Roddy Bogawa … actor: 玛丽亚·施奈德 / Drew Droege …
other title: 30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing
Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones.

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Cinetracts '20 (2020)
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sky hopinka / CAMERON GRANGER …
For Cinetracts ’20, twenty filmmakers and artists around the world were invited by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University to make a 2-minute short following certain rules and capturing “the zeitgeist in your own backyard”. In this selection from the full program we find inspired, illuminating, and personal contributions by Cameron Granger, Sky Hopinka, the Karrabing Film Collective, Bouchra Khalili, Gabriel Mascaro and Apichatpong Weerasethakul – and perhaps some ways to answer Cameroonian documentarian Rosine Mbakam’s question: “What history are we going to write after this pandemic?”

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Nabua Song (2009)
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Petch, one of the young men of Nabua, composed and plays this song about his village written to commemorate the first shoot-out between the army and the farmer communists 43 years before. The song is combined with an image of Kamgiang, Petch’s friend, whose grandfather was killed by the soldiers in the field not far from his home.

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Malee and the Boy (1999)
Malee and the Boy Douban
other title: 玛拉和小孩
影片原名叫《玛拉与小孩、麦克风和饥饿的撒旦》。电影的主人公是一个拥有一支麦克风的小男孩。他游走于曼谷不同地方来搜集录像所需的声音。拍摄期间,声音成为了指向他下一个目的地的元素,同时也展示了小男孩的兴趣所在。导演负责影像的拍摄,而拍摄完全取决于小男孩的位置。影片的文字叙述来自于一本在拍摄现场发现的泰国连环画。

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Primitive (2009)
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A few weeks after the spaceship has been built, the teens have adopted it as a place to drink and sleep. Weerasethakul documents this integration and makes a fictional narrative with them. The film progresses from evening into night, presenting various kinds of lights. The fiction merges with candid portraits of the teens playing with fireworks and military flares.