With Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) and Cemetery of Splendour (2015) Apichatpong Weerasethakul made two of the best films of recent years.
On December
15 2016 HRH Prince Constantijn presented the Principal Prince Claus Award in
Amsterdam to independent filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand.
The annual
Prince Claus Awards honour outstanding achievements in culture and development,
particularly in areas where resources or opportunities for cultural expression,
creative production and preservation of cultural heritage are limited.
For a boy
from a small town who was addicted to science fictions and ghost stories, this
is for me one of the bright spots in a long journey. I remember when I was
little I was playing with a flashlight underneath my blanket. I pretended that
was my movie theatre. The patterns inside the blanket, whatever they were - the
flowers, the animals, the geometric shapes, conspired to create stories. They
were full of ghosts and monsters, and stars….
Out of the
blanket, some situations in that little home operated like dreams. In that same
bed, one day, there were non‐stop cartoons on our B&W television. Somehow
all the stations decided to broadcast 24 hours Disney’s and Looney Tunes’. That
was a special event for us kids. We didn’t go play outside for the whole day.
Years later, I learned that that day, far away in Bangkok, the soldiers and the
police were storming into a university, shot and killed student protesters en
masse.
Fiction and
reality always intertwine like two snakes or two butterflies. For me, they
transform and devour each other through time. You confront them in order to
understand your world. And I realise that this world, this blanket from
childhood years has expanded immensely. In fact, we are all sharing the same
blanket. Our lights awaken one another.
'Apichatpong
Weerasethakul is awarded for the visual richness, spiritual lyricism and
intellectual depth of his provocative works; for his subtle yet powerful
examination of Thai realities that resonates beyond his own society; for
inventing an original cinematic language that evokes a live experience of the
animist sense of being, reinstating a way of connecting paralysed by western
mechanisms that disrupt the body’s ability to evaluate what is good for life
and what isn’t; for transforming filmmaking into something far more complex and
far-reaching, clearly demonstrating that artistic excellence creates experience
and is inseparable from the social and political; and for inspiring others by
remaining uncompromisingly true to his own vision and principles.'
From the
2016 Prince Claus Awards Committee Report.
What about
the differences between dreams and reality? Are dreams and reality the same
thing for you – is there no real difference?
I think so
– it’s actually just about the mind and how we perceive things. I started to
observe how I dream and think, and my dreams are mostly fairly narrative rather
than being like a Hollywood film or something that has a lot of special
effects. My dreams are more subtle, more like life. Don’t you think dreams are
not like a Salvador Dali painting? They are more than that. Dreams for me are gentler
than the typical dreams in movies.
Do you feel
comfortable including these supernatural elements in your films? It seems to
have become almost a routine for you.
Well, I
think that this is simply a documentation of how I lived because in Thailand we
are ready to believe and to see the invisible. It’s our reality so it has
layers of this thing. I know what you mean – that it is becoming routine – so
for this film I felt that I should try not to have monkeys!
Drawing
from his personal archive of film and photographs, Apichatpong Weerasethakul will
lead a masterclass in which a select audience will gain valuable insight into
this acclaimed artist/filmmakers practice, through the making of the Primitive.
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