Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival (MIEFF) present a mini-retrospective of the early films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the winner of the Palme d'Or prize, including his short films and his first full-length film Mysterious Object at Noon.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970, Bangkok) started creating experimental films and video installations while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1997, receiving a master's degree in Fine Arts and Filmmaking. His first full-length film, Mysterious Object at Noon, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000, and his second full-length film, Blissfully Yours won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard program at the 55th Cannes Film Festival in 2002.
In 2010, Weerasethakul received the Cannes Festival’s highest award—the Palme d'Or prize—for the film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The film Syndromes and a Century, shown at the 63rd Venice Film Festival, was the first Thai film to be included in the contest program of this festival. From 1999–2008, Weerasethakul co-organized the Bangkok Festival of Experimental Cinema. His films were also shown at numerous art exhibitions, including the 7th Istanbul Biennale (2001), the 10th and 11th Sharjah Biennale (UAE, 2011, 2013), dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, 2012), the 20th Sydney Biennale (2016), and the 14th Lyon Biennale (2017). In 2016, the Tate Gallery held a retrospective of the director's films, and in the autumn of 2017, the exhibition Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kao Guimaranis opens at the Amsterdam Film Museum EYE.