The Asylum

A visual project made from old film negatives discovered in an out-of-business film lab.

A collage of voices from activists forced to flee the country offers glimpses into Myanmar’s history through three locations: Yangon Zoological Gardens, Yangon Circle Railway, and the Drug Elimination Museum.

The Japan-born son of an illegal Thai immigrant faces deportation under Japan's increasingly conservative immigration policy. Filmed in careful detail, Prapat Jiwarangsan draws a portrait of the young man by scratching onto a photograph of his silhouette, a process that brings out his humanity more than an anonymous state statistic.

This film was made from hundreds of educational slides that belonged to the late Professor Somkiat Tang-namo, a pioneer of art aesthetics in Thailand and the founder of the first Thai virtual university for free public education. The educational slide, once a new educational medium, is now an obsolete one – a ghostly medium that hides memories of its time.

Longing for a life beyond her hometown in the Thai province of Buriram, Ploy moves to various Southeast Asian cities in search of work. She ends up in Singapore as a sex worker at an illegal, makeshift brothel operating under the cover of a jungle’s leafy darkness that is eventually turned into a public park.

In the last couple of years, thousands of illegal Thai migrant workers in South Korea are deported back to Thailand, while thousands more slipped through the borders to take up both legal and illegal jobs. Calling themselves ‘ghosts’, they left their homeland for a foreign country whose language they cannot speak, work towards an uncertain future, and hide like phantoms to evade the authorities. The film observes the situation of these workers, as well as visits the other generation of Thai migrant worker in South Korea, an 80 year-old Thai veteran who once fought a Korean war.