Apichatpong-a-rama: Swinton and an Uncle Boonmee trailer

For a quick followup to the previous update on all things Apichatpong and the director's possible next project Mekong Hotel, I turn to The Playlist:

The project definitely sounds like the director’s gestating project with thespian Tilda Swinton which was noted to center on the eponymous river and “address the relationship between man and water, the catastrophic flooding which is blamed on Chinese dams and diseases spread by industrial-scale pig farming.”

“It’s definitely not going to be a film that will just have a foreign movie star for the sake of it,” Weerasethakul previously told the Guardian. “It’s going to be an exchange of ideas, of images, of ... I don’t know. It’s like a game for me: the river, the pigs, and Tilda Swinton.”

It won’t be first time the director has explored the Mekong (the river which runs through his native Thailand as well as Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) with one of his shorter projects, Luminous People, centering on a man’s journey on the river scattering the ashes of his dead father. That effort was part of one segment of the 2007 omnibus film, State of the World.

Swinton and Apichatpong have long wanted to work together. She invoked his Tropical Malady back in 2006 in the State of Cinema address at the San Francisco International Film Festival, saying:

"I actually remember rubbing my eyes with my fists in a comedy gesture during the screening, convinced, for one split second, that I fallen asleep, that only my unconscious could have come up with such a texture of sensation."

The Playlist also picks up on the Edinburgh Film Festival curating project.

And they have the U.S. trailer for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, catfish sex and all.

It's embedded below.