Review: The Sun, My Friend

8 Apr

7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival
By Sasha Han

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ‘A Conversation with the Sun’, 2025, VR Performance. Image courtesy of Chanel.

To live in the tropics is to seek shelter from the sun that hangs directly over the nape of heads bent away from its glare. In the face of unbearable heat, turning away from the sun provides relief from its blaze, and a temporary exit. Since complete withdrawal is futile however, the filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul stages an encounter which would put the participant “in the state of just being present” in his multi-form work, ‘A Conversation with the Sun.’ At the Virtual reality (VR) Bangkok premiere of ‘Conversation’ at the 7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, the audience is led on an ascent to a celestial plane for a close-up encounter with the sun. There, Apichatpong proposes a means of being acutely present: by leaving ourselves open to wonder.

Foyer of the 7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. Image courtesy of Adisorn Klomkleaw.

Returning after a decade-long hiatus, this year’s edition of the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival was curated by Mary Pansanga. Spanning film, live performances and workshops, the festival further showcased special sections by past curators of the festival, David Teh and May Adadol Ingawanij, alongside guest curators including the Thai Film Archive, Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa, Chayanin Tiangpitayagorn, Julian Ross and the collective Kaddukkas. It also marked a consolidated return to the vicinity of Lumphini Park — in the luxurious setting at the integrated mall-office One Bangkok Forum, one of the sponsors of the festival. Though some events, such as ‘Conversation,’ and theatre performances by the collective Fullfat and the multidisciplinary artist Puangsoi Aksornsawang were ticketed, the festival stuck to its earlier prerogative to make screenings free and accessible to the audience.

Derived from Apichatpong’s contemplation of the sun on long walks, the first iteration of ‘A Conversation with the Sun’ (2022) at BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY was an installation consisting of Apichatpong’s diary videos of his loved ones sleeping and a mechanised fabric screen. The work featured conversations between Apichatpong and GPT-3, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot that ranged from existential musings of their work and explorations of alien planets. Over the course of their journey, their friends Tilda Swinton, Arthur C. Clarke and the moon make special appearances. The accompanying publication to this installation was an AI-generated script marked by peculiar turning points and large leaps in plot beats. It ultimately functioned more as an dizzying exercise to probe at the limits of language and logic. The VR edition of the project expands on these limits to ask how a conversation can take place without many words at all. Can a conversation be entirely non-verbal in nature, consisting only of an exchange of signs and images?

If the chatbot seemed like a one-sided ‘Conversation’ into a blackhole, the VR follow-up was instead an exercise in negotiating and respecting the orbital paths of others. At the beginning of the show, we were handed placards with instructions to not approach other viewers who would “appear as spheres of light in the virtual world”. Entering the venue, we encountered a large screen on which a series of sleeping figures were projected—along with the previous batch of participants still in the midst of their exploration. With the VR goggles on their heads, Apichatpong’s career-long fixation on sleep as an invigorating and legitimate creative practice extended past the screen more poignantly than ever before. Where they were largely relegated to the screen in his films Blissfully Yours (2002), Cemetery of Splendour (2015) and Memoria (2021), or through the invitation to literally sleep under a canopy of films in the cinemas at ‘SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL’ (2018), the ‘Conversation’ VR enacted an active kind of dreaming that dissolved the binary between reality and dream world of the VR-scape.

Putting on the VR headset, I saw an arena of screens showing portraits of people in slumber. These images were soon replaced by the looming descent of large asteroidal objects. Instead of a crash landing, the asteroids sunk into the ground and on top of each other to form a cave around which the numerous light spheres of fellow audience shone brighter. They further illuminate paths to walk through and the insides of a giant stone, revealing paleolithic prints and galactic formations of the cosmos. Apichatpong has gathered and brought us back to when caves were points for a community to light and create images on the walls together. At some point, the ground disappeared beneath our feet and we ascended past the cave’s column until we found ourselves in front of the sun that had withheld itself from us so far. Its absence seemed to further make the gathering of light spheres more pronounced. The energy provided enough illumination to equal that of the sun in the dark.

Jeanne Penjan Lassus, ‘a part of us exposed’, 2025, Three-channel video installation as part of COSMORAMA. Commissioned by the 7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. Image courtesy of Miti Ruangkritya.

Sponsored by Chanel’s Cultural Fund, ‘Conversation’ featured Apichatpong’s collaboration with digital artist Katsuya Taniguchi who interpreted Apichatpong’s storyboards and the beloved late composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto. The VR installation shared the largest hall at the convention centre with ‘COSMORAMA’, a three-channel installation built on scaffolding that screened five silent films by Chantana Tiprachart, Jeanne Penjan Lassus, Domenico Singha Pedroli, Miti Ruangkritya, and Pathompon Tesprateep commissioned by the festival. Sakamoto’s score for ‘Conversation’ spilled over ‘COSMORAMA’’s orbit of the sun.

On other days, the cavernous hall was transformed into a performing arts venue starring Tilda Swinton in a lecture-performance piece titled ‘An Encounter: The Last Thing You Saw That Felt Like a Movie’ and an experimental concert venue for SO::ON Dry Flower’s live music performance ‘Night of the Dry Flowers’. In other words, Apichatpong, who founded the festival in 1997 with Gridthiya Gaweewong, is the driving force for the festival to begin and the means through which emerging artists continue to find their platform through the festival's sprawling 14 Open Call programmes, much like the sun that creates the gravitational pull that keeps planets in orbit.

About the Writer

Sasha Han is a film writer seeking to reify the fugitive effects of looking through language. Broadly, her interests lie in examining the circulation of images in Southeast Asia. She is an alumnus of critics labs at the Locarno Film Festival, Far East Film Festival and the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF). Her writing has been published by the Asian Film Archive, Documentary Magazine, MARG1N magazine, Mekong Review and MUBI Notebook.