Advertising their 35mm camera, the LomoKino website invites potential customers to “go back to the early days of motion picture” while awakening their own “analogue cinematic fantasies”—as Thailand’s reigning auteur, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, has done (except for a digital finale) with his exquisite, haunting “Ashes.” This short work—since its premiere at Cannes last Friday it has […]

Clocking in at under 18 minutes, “A Letter to Uncle Boonmee” is nevertheless a major work by Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, not merely a nifty preface to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, for which Apichatpong won the 2010 Palme d’Or at Cannes. Its brevity, moreover, helped impose a powerful rigor on the material. […]

The son of two medical doctors at a rural clinic (see his Syndromes and a Century, 2006), young Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul grew up feeling greater comfort than most children among the sick and the dying, and with a greater appreciation for the close connection between life and death. Apichatpong prefaces the hauntingly quiet, gentle Loong […]

Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has said that Sang sattawat is a tale of two trees representing his doctor-parents, one on the grounds of a rural hospital in the 1970s, the other on the grounds of an urban hospital in the present day. The film is divided into two parts—the bifurcated structure begging a series of […]

From Thailand, the lovely, brimming Sud sanaeha takes us into the mountains, forest and water at the Thai-Burmese border; but it opens abruptly in Khon Kaen, in a forest-green draped clinic that in fact had been where writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s parents, both medical doctors, practiced. Min, a patient, was there once before; the rash for […]