Cemetery of Splendor
The From Below Microcinema will be showing Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor (2015) on Thursday, 3/14 at 7:00pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will open at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
Set in director Weerasethakul’s hometown of Khon Kaen, and reportedly the last film of his celebrated career that he will make in Thailand, Cemetery of Splendor is an intimate and melancholic film about a mysterious sickness that causes soldiers to randomly fall into a deep slumber. A derelict elementary school turned field hospital, built upon an ancient cemetery, houses the tender relationship between a sleeping soldier, the woman who cares for him, and a psychic spirit medium. All the while a strange, unknown government excavation project is occurring next to the clinic.
Weerasethakul gives us an inactive, or even anti-active, languid cinema of the stillness and in-betweenness of life. Through long takes and still camerawork, we tiptoe through a necropolis that lies not so much beneath a town as within it, sustaining to and demanding nourishment from the living. The characters encounter a variety of dreams and hauntings that don’t erupt or act but simply dwell, waiting for disclosure to, or by, an attentive witness.
The film itself teeters on boundaries, set literally near the border between Laos and Thailand, while passing back and forth between sleeping and wakefulness, life and death, self and other, dream and reality. The past, present, and future are quilted together at the site of the dreaming, not-quite corpse of the sleeping soldier. Cemetery of Splendor offers a rewarding and characteristically uncanny meditation on love, history, care, and the murmuring legacies of neocolonialism living in the mundane and mythic recesses of Thailand.