Short films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

A blessing for any kind of event is one of the most important rituals of Thai society. That is why, before every film shown in Thailand, the national anthem is played as a sign of respect for the king.

Weerasethakul pays respect to this tradition with a demonstration of "kinogimna", a special ceremony held by an elderly woman, designed to balance the viewers’ energy and purify their minds to ensure the improvement of their lives by the end of the session.

This short film from Weerasethakul’s student years, unlike his subsequent works, was filmed on 16 mm film during his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The film consists of an image of the director's mother, flickering and blurred, accompanied by fragments of their telephone conversation.

thirdworld is a survey film of the landscape of Paniyi Island in the south of Thailand, and combines documentary filming of the island's landscapes with stories of local people’s fantasies and dreams. The director himself defines the film as a "reconstructed documentary". The name of the film plays on the expression adopted in the West to identify Thailand and other exotic countries.

Letter to Uncle Boonmee represents the first step on the road to creating a full-length film called Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which received the Palme d'Or prize of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. In 2008, Weerasethakul went to the village of Naboo in search of suitable content for the upcoming full-length film. The result of this trip was a short “film-letter” in which the director describes Naboo to Uncle Boonmee, a once-living person who claimed that he remembered his previous lives.

In their stories, residents of the north of Thailand describe a small bird called Nok Phi as a horrible predator with huge eyes, who feeds on blood. No one has ever been able to catch this bird, but in 2007 it was rumored that two species were seen high in the mountains. Weerasethakul’s camera crew went to the jungle to find the Nok Phi bird and capture it on camera.

The silent film My Mother's Garden, created by the request of the Dior fashion house, was inspired by Victoire de Castellane’s jewelry, which looks like poisonous flowers and carnivorous plants.

A home photo-film filmed with a LomoKino camera takes viewers to the village where Weerasethakul lives for one day. The director himself wrote a short description of his film: “King Kong rarely barked. She had been with us since she was three months old. Every night she slept and looked around in her dreams. We thought that our spirits were enriched by the fertile soil and the greenest leaves and the rarest insects and the abundance of humility. But came a day in March we woke up from our dream. The sky wept ashes. The rotten ground trembled as baby worms rose to taste the gray snow. Across the mountains the light of devotion shone and blinded our souls. The darkness was so bright we wept and shouted in silence. And we woke up again, and again.”

Strange smoke descends on a village and engulfs it. It envelops roofs, beds, chairs, carpets, grass and bodies, infecting them with its white, numbing fever. The events in the film Vapour take place in the village of Toongha, where Weerasethakul lived for several years. Like many other villages in Thailand, Toongha suffers from land management problems, which resulted in a confrontation between villagers and the local government lasting for more than sixty years. The film will be accompanied by a soundtrack, composed by Dmitry Anikin, an electro-acoustic musician.