Meet the Filmmakers: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

To watch the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul is to enter a world where memory, dreams, and reality fold into one another. From his audaciously uncategorizable debut feature, Mysterious Object at Noon, and his Palme d’Or–winning masterpiece Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, to his acclaimed recent film Cemetery of Splendor, his oeuvre has taken a consistently surprising and idiosyncratic approach to film form, interweaving vividly tactile depictions of the natural world with metaphysical flights of imagination. For our latest episode of Meet the Filmmakers, on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, Canadian actor and director Connor Jessup traveled to meet with Apichatpong in the Colombian jungle, where the Thai maverick was location scouting for his next project—which just last week was announced as a movie called Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton. The result of their time together, A.W. A Portrait of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, offers a rare glimpse into the filmmaker’s creative world and the passions that fuel his work. Check out the above trailer for the program, then head over to the Channel to watch the whole documentary alongside a sampling of Apichatpong’s films.