Tropical Mysteries, Luminous People – The Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (born 1970) is one of the most outstanding and idiosyncratic proponents of international auteur cinema today. His unique films elude conventional categories: neither unambiguously fiction nor documentary, they do not adhere to narrative plausibility and logic, but deliberately work non-linearly with voids and irritating moments: The films are often divided into two parts, with the relation between both frequently remaining opaque; at times the opening credits run till the middle of the film; there are intertitles, animals gifted in language or suddenly a black hole in the picture. This instinctive freedom of narration lends Weerasethakul’s films a fascinatingly hypnotic effect and enormous imaginative power. What characterizes Weerasethakul's oeuvre, in addition to the documentary basis of his aesthetics and his work with lay actors, is his interest in Thai oral history as well as his adoption of existing popular formats (soap operas, legends, radio plays, comics, vintage films), which he newly contextualized in his films. Pivotal to his work is the topos of the jungle, the place of a different intensity, a different level of awareness, of a utopia or of a mythical realm that opposes the order of reality. His imaginations are based on myths and memories, but at times indeed possess political contours, for the real can be permeated by the supernatural (and vice versa).