Cemetery of Splendour

Considered by many to rank among the most important artists working in the film medium today, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (affectionately referred to by cinephiles by his nickname “Joe”) has produced one of world cinema’s most idiosyncratic bodies of work: characters return in film after film that draw on Thai folktales, Buddhist ideas of the afterlife, and the narrative codes of the Western avant-garde. In Cemetery of Splendour—a major new achievement that has been cited as one of the year’s best by prestigious film magazines Cahiers du cinéma andSight and Sound—Thai soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness are housed in a temporary rural clinic. There, past and present, waking state and dream all become indecipherable—even as we glimpse the troubled current political condition in Thailand, following the coup d’état that the Royal Army launched in 2014.  Filled with surreal beauty and the scatological alike, Cemetery of Splendour is the ideal introduction to one of the art form’s most original voices.