Apichatpong Weerasethakul Cemetery of Splendour 2015
Apichatpong Weerasethakul Cemetery of Splendour 2015 film still
Apichatpong Weerasethakul Cemetery of Splendour 2015 film still
Apichatpong Weerasethakul Cemetery of Splendour 2015
Apichatpong Weerasethakul Vapour 2015
Weerasethakul presents his latest feature Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น) 2015 ahead of its theatrical release on 17 June, preceded by the UK premiere of his short film Vapour (หมอกแม่ริม) 2015. These recent works are each set in locations with much personal significance to the filmmaker – the former takes place in his hometown of Khon Kaen and the latter in the village where he has been living for the past nine years. Carrying through the poignant undertones that have come to define his work, Weerasethakul’s evocative uses of sleep and fog in these films subtly suggest the political climate of 2015’s post-coup Thailand.
Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น) 2015 is presented ahead of its theatrical release on June 17, which will coincide with the opening of Weerasethakul’s installation Primitive 2009 in The Tanks as part of the new Tate Modern.
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Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น)
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Film programme
Vapour (หมอกแม่ริม)
Thailand / Korea / China 2015, DCP, black and white and colour, silent, 21 min
Vapour unfolds as an allegorical portrait of a northern Thai village engulfed in a thick fog and a quiet rage. The site of several violent confrontations around land ownership, Toongha – the village Weerasethakul now calls home – has served as battleground between people and state for the past sixty years. Every June, masked exterminators cast an eerie mist upon the mosquito-swarmed village, each house slowly disappearing behind the smokescreen.
Cemetery of Splendour (รักที่ขอนแก่น)
Thailand /UK/ France/ Germany/ Malaysia 2015, DCP, colour, sound, 122 min, Thai with English subtitles.
Ruminating on the ever-present force of the past on the present, Cemetery of Splendour observes as nurses, families and volunteers tend to a group of soldiers stricken by a mysterious sleep epidemic. Doctors use coloured light therapy to ease the soldiers’ troubled dreams, which slowly reveal themselves to bear a connection to an ancient burial site lying beneath the clinic grounds. Following the relationship that emerges between Jen, a clinic volunteer, and Itt, the somnolent soldier she has been caring for, the film increasingly gives way to hallucination, phantoms and romance.
Programme duration: 145 min
The screening is introduced by Tate Modern’s outgoing director, Chris Dercon, and followed by a Q&A with the audience.