Two Talented Young Film Makers from Small Countries

American film schools must have done something right, even if American films themselves seemed ultimately iterative and dull these days. The path to success is to come from some small obscure countries without any baggage and learn the required theory and techniques and then go home and make films. Two films I saw this weekend convinced me of this. But of course, other than the ability for cross-culture exchange, the key is the talent. Without that, even the richness of unexplored heritage would go wasted. What also could help is, hm, some dose of gayness. I don’t know whether these two directors are gay or not, but I have reasons to believe so. They tend to think beyond conventions and take their liberty to dive in the complexity of sexualities. And the end result is usually refreshing and thought-provoking.

As a graduate of Chicago Art Institute and from Thailand, Weerasethakul (shortened as Joe) became more widely known when he won a special Jury prize at Cannes for his new film Tropical Malady. But his works have had enough followers through words of mouth way before that. His name becomes equivalent to New Thai Cinema. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which always pays special attention to Asian art, put together a three-day program to feed the converted and the curious. Unfortunately, I only got chance to catch the last show which was also his debut feature film called Mysterious Object at Noon. I walked in the theatre knowing nothing about the film. After first 20 minutes of confusion, I suddenly got the idea and the rest was an exciting and engaging ride. Using unrelated real storytellers from school kids to village elders, the movie slips in and out of the narrated story and blends both reality and fiction into one coherent flow. You can read the film as a deconstructive means to analyze narrative and its social-economical or psychological roots. You can also use it to experience Thailand as a country with lively and diverse culture heritage. Regardless of what you walk away with, the film does not give straight answer about what it is about. Maybe that is also the reason why his films could be so controversial. People either hate them or love them, and there don’t seem to be anyone in between. (Interesting enough, I found out that my friend Mike also blogged on this film and he absolutely hated it. See this link).

Apichatpong showed up after the screening and answered a few of my questions (plus others) with his usual modesty and economy of words. He did not want to explain why and how he made his films and insisted on following his own instinct in all his works. As his films are getting more and more budget and more polished technically, let’s hope he would never get corrupted by studio systems in Thailand or in Hollywood. After all, he is a true avant-garde visual artist in his heart.

While the Apichatpong retrospective was taking place in SOMA, Castro Theater was taken over by the annual Latino Film festival. One of the great things about San Francisco is its all-year-round film festivals where you can find films you won’t see anywhere else. More reasons not to move to the red states! The only flick I caught turned out to be the very outstanding piece from a very young Bolivian film maker named Rodrigo Bellot, who studied films in Cornell and broke into the international scene with this very debut. Presented entirely in split screen, I was slightly annoyed in the first 10 minutes but quickly got over the nuance of constant focus shifts and started to really enjoy the double perspectives. The film did not stop there. The split evolves and becomes a style device which moves freely between contrasting tones and rhythms, between mirrored and echoed images and voices, and between converged and diverged view points. In the end, it becomes a true work of art.

But what I found most interesting are the plots: Five interconnected stories that moved from both high and low classes of Bolivia to Cornell. The backgrounds of the characters could not be more different, but they share things in common: prejudice, global consumerism, identity confusion, and sex driven by something less pure. Bellot presented a panoramic view of a problematic world, where tensions of race, class and sexuality are so palpable and intense while they have to find strange and dangerous outlets in sex acts. This theme is not entirely new due to widely-practiced postmodernism in art, but a fusion of this theme with both South and North America under one critical lens is definitely new.

Both Weerasethakul and Rodrigo were born in 70s and still in the early stage of their careers. Their rising reputation and growing body of works indicate that film-making, as an art form of one hundred year old, is taking new directions in many geographic fronts although there is a uniting philosophical ground underneath. While Apichatpong’s film turns narratives inside out, Rodrigo focuses on manipulation of media images and reveals what is behind. The deconstruction is in full gear and Derrida must be smiling in his new grave.