Palme d'Or-winning Thai director Apichatpong Weerasuthakul goes 'Primitive'

"Primitive," the newest multimedia art installation by award-winning Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasuthakul, wasn't a contrived project.  

Now showing at Bangkok's Jim Thompson Art Center until February 29, 2012, it's actually the third artistic expression to come out of an unplanned trip Apichatpong took to Nabua, a tiny village in northeast Thailand, in 2008.

Music videos, sound installations and light experiments collected during his journey all represent a rarely discussed piece of history he only discovered by speaking with village elders.

In the 1960s, the Thai government set its sights on Nabua's communist insurgents -- who also happened to be farmers -- and sent forces in to drive them out, ushering in two decades of military control. 

“Legend says that Nabua used to be known as 'Widow Town,'” says Apichatpong, who won the Palme d'Or in Cannes last year for his film “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives."

“The men would leave town and be found dead or disappear so often that all that was left in the villages were women and children.”

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"Primitive" focuses on the youth of the town because they were the children of the survivors, he says. Yet they didn't experience the brutality of the military regime first-hand.

“[Primitive] is about reincarnation and transformation,” says Apichatpong, “a celebration of the destructive forces in nature and in us which burn in order to create mutation and rebirth.”

Among his collected footage is a collaborative effort by villagers to make a spaceship, which, he says, represents “the idea of a journey, an escape, and a disappearance.

“The spaceship's form was sketched out by one of the teens and its metal skeletons were welded together by their elders, their fathers.”

Collecting these pieces to represent an unwritten history might seem like an odd way to portray it, but Apichatpong thinks otherwise.

“The direct way is to write about it or read a bunch of scholarly essays and research,” he says. “But, it didn't make sense to repeat that information as a cinematographer. I wanted to present something that I learned, that I did during that time.

“I wanted to do that instead of interviewing. I did interview the old generation, but for the kids -- that's why we built the ship because it showed their politics, like a play.” 

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The link between 'Uncle Boonmee' and 'Primitive'

Apichatpong's award-winning "Uncle Boonmee" is a film about a man in rural northeast Thailand who spends his dying days exploring his past lives with his loved ones -- including the ghost of his dead wife and his lost son, who comes to him in a non-human form. 

Though comparisons between the film and Primitive are inevitable, Apichatpong maintains that they are completely separate expressions of art, with just one similarity.

“The link is just memories,” he says. “In Uncle Boonmee they're trying to recall centuries, but the people in Primitive are trying to forget what they've gone through in only one lifetime.”