Apichatpong's Phantoms of Nabua to premiere online

Phantoms of Nabua, a short film that is part of the multi-platform Primitive project by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, will premiere online on Wednesday, February 18, at the Animate Projects website:

Here is more about the short, in Apichatpong's own words, from the Animate Projects website:

The film’s setting is a rear projection of Nabua (from the Primitive installation) and a recreation of a fluorescent light pole back in my hometown. I used this setting as a playground for the teens who emerged from the dark with a football raging with fire. They took turns kicking the ball that left illuminated trails on the grass. Finally they burned the screen which revealed behind it a ghostly white beam of a projector.

Like A Letter To Uncle Boonmee, Phantoms of Nabua is a portrait of home. The film portrays a communication of lights, the lights that exude, on the one hand, the comfort of home and, on the other, of destruction.

Nabua is a village in northeast Thailand that the filmmaker visited as part of research for his next film project. It had been at the center of the Thai government's fight to wipe out communist insurgents back in the day.

Phantoms of Nabua accompanies another short film, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, which will have its world premiere on February 20 at the Film Museum in Munich. On the same day, Apichatpong's much-anticipated Primitive installation opens at Haus der Kunst in Munich, where it runs until May 17. Primitive then moves to FACT in Liverpool from September 25 to November 29.

As part of "the Year of Apichatpong Weerasethakul", there will be a 200-page monograph edited by James Quandt from Wallflower Press. There will also be a Primitive book, due later in the year from by Edizioni Zero in Milan.

And plans are in the works for a feature film component to all this Uncle Boonmee: A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

More on this massive project is at Electric Sheep.

(Via Electric Sheep)