News  ·  08 | 08 | 2019

Maladie blanche

Moving Ahead - Krabi, 2562

If you ever happen to go boating in the Krabi waters in Thailand, you might, between the James Bond island (a shooting location for The Man with the Golden Gun) and the Danny Boyle beach (ruined by twenty years of mass tourism), stumble upon other small islands within which you can glimpse very well preserved ancient cave paintings. It’s in this neighborhood, equal parts prehistoric and modern, new and old, Eastern and Western, fact and fiction, that Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers set up their film, which is an extension of a partnership that began during the inaugural edition of the Thailand Biennale in 2018. Mixing real people and fictional characters (a townswoman with flexible identities, her guide, a commercial director played by Oliver Laxe, a singer-actor, a prehistoric couple), they create a portrait of communities and workers from the region by injecting their stories – personal or myths – into a set-up that goes beyond pure documentary present to waver between historic instability and camp demystification. As a side dish we also screen Joshua Gen Solondz’s (tourism studies), an assembly of fragments in the form of Rorschach tests filmed over a ten-year period.

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