The Spirit Level

Bangkok 2006, amid brewing political tension, a family, led by politician Parl, shares one final night together at the safe house before a coup d'état forces him into exile.

THE AGE OF ANXIETY meditates on fin de siècle Thailand. The film deconstructs the hallucinatory film footages of the Thai melodrama of the 80’s into thousands of frantic fragments, like the violent stabs of disturbing memories, perpetual nightmares and reinventing histories, that ascend the viewers into the mind-expanding horizon of a fragile nation on the verge of madness.

“Shadow and Act” navigates through the remains of Chaya Jitrakorn, once the most prominent photo studio in Thailand built in 1940 and was the only preferred studio of the dictator Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram. The film explores the studio’s 72-year archives and its owner’s personal photographs while representing the defunct studio like the corpse of the deceased Giant. The film experiments with the relationships between memory and space as well as the past and the future.

Assembling moments of eruptive beauty from five films, all of which were made in the early 1980s, Time of the Last Persecution reanimates the force of metamorphosis in the rhythm of a soaring cadenza. The video is structured through the rapid montage and the close up, yet it observes the gliding pace of the circular slow motion.

The Mental Traveller meditates on the passing of time, external behavior and sensory reality for five men on a psychiatric ward. The film was conceived from the director’s connections to his parents and companions as they went through states of sickness, impending death, dementia, grief and temporary insanity. At the same time, it echoes the turbulent years of political upheavals and repercussions in Thailand, resulting in a nation in a state of delirium, lunacy and trauma.

A sensorial, left-field take on Thai political history that moves between a subdued past etched in the landscape of Khao Kho mountain, once a stronghold of communist insurgents, and a dynamic near-present marked by Bangkok’s 2021 anti-government protests.