News

When Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film premiered it Cannes, it was like someone just opened the window and let in some much-needed fresh air into the festival. Relegated in a detail of obscure festival politics to the second-tier Un Certain Regard section, where in recent years such too-adventurous works like Jean-Luc Godard's Film socialisme and Claire Denis's Bastards were shunted aside, I came to Cemetery of Splendour assuming the director was going to follow-up on his Palme d'Or of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives with something as grand if not grander, and as bizarre if not even more bizarre. I should have known Apichatpong would move in mysterious ways and defy expectations.A small, humble film, in fact the most constricted of his full features, Cemetery of Splendour rather than working the surface of story, the surface of space, and the surface of drama and reality,...

As I mentioned in the preface to the first part of my Wavelengths preview (the one focusing on the short films), there are significant changes afoot in 2012. Until last year, the festival had a section known as Visions, which was the primary home for formally challenging cinema that nevertheless conformed to the basic tenets of arthouse and/or “festival” cinema (actors, scripting, 70+minute running time, and, once upon a time, 35mm presentation). This year, Wavelengths is both its former self, and it also contains the sort of work that Visions most likely would have housed. While in some respects this can seem to result in a kind of split personality for the section, it also means that Wavelengths, which has often been described as a sort of “festival within the festival,” has moved front and center. Films that would’ve occupied single slots in the older avant-Wavelengths model, like the...

Two years ago Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought a feature film to the Festival de Cannes and walked away with one of the most adventurous Palme d'Ors ever given out. He returned to the Croisette in 2012 to present two shorter projects: the mini-feature Mekong Hotel, assembled from slivers of an unproduced feature project and combined with other ideas, and Ashes, a short film shot on the LomoKino camera and part of a collaboration between the filmmaker, Lomography and Mubi. (Ashes is now playing for free on Mubi.) I had a chance to sit down and chat with Apichatpong behind the noisy fervor of the Short Film Corner, deep, deep under the festival's palais right after he'd addressed a crowd of young filmmakers.

Daniel Kasman: I overheard two anecdotes from your master class in the Short Film Corner...one was a warning about not making films while in love?

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: [Laughs] Yes.

We're tremendously excited to bring to you a new short film by Palme d'Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Ashes. The short is part of a collaboration between the filmmaker, LomoKino and Mubi resulting in the LomoKino Mubi Edition, a simple-to-use 35mm camera. Each special edition camera comes with a scene from Apichatpong's film.

In Ashes, which was shot almost entirely on the LomoKino with a digital finale, Apichatpong contemplates love, pleasure, and the destruction of memory. The surroundings of everyday life are shared with extreme intimacy. For Apichatpong, Thailand, while full of beauty, is slowly collapsing into darkness.

"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...

Mekong Hotel – Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Buzz: Allegedly involving Tilda Swinton at some point and focusing on flooding and pig farming in the area surrounding the Mekong River, the festival surprised arthouse fans when they announced that this enigmatic project, with nary a detail surfacing in the weeks since. Coming off of a huge victory at Cannes in 2010, it’s a notably modest return to the Croisette for Thai Joe, but with him, cinephiles will take what they can get. Almost as buzzed-up is the news that another film by Weerasethakul – the 20-minute Ashes – will unspool in the Market a day before streaming for free on Mubi. Added all up and we’ve got ourselves almost 90 minutes of new material to play with.

The Gist: 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.