Perhaps no Asian film director has so sensitively -- and so mysteriously -- captured the enchantments of daily living and envisioned the continuing vitality of magical and spiritual presences of daily life, as has Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Illuminations Films is working now on Apichatpong's new multi-platform project Primitive, and we're proud to be continuing our working relationship with him, having co-produced his last feature film Syndromes and a Century, 2006. Syndromes... premiered at the 63rd Venice Film Festival and was the first Thai film to have been entered in competition there.

Apichatpong (who is also known as 'Joe') was born in 1970 in Bangkok, and grew up in Khon Kaen in northeastern Thailand. He has a degree in Architecture from Khon Kaen University and a Master of Fine Arts in Filmmaking from The School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. Since he began making films and videos in the early 1990s, he has become one of the few filmmakers in Thailand who have worked outside the strict Thai studio system.

He has exhibited many of his art projects internationally, and has made a large number of short films and four features. With the very distinctive vision of the feature films, he has become one of the major international young filmmakers to watch and a key figure in the emerging Thai cinema. His feature Tropical Malady, which won the jury prize in Cannes in 2004, revealed a close understanding of the almost musical rhythms of film, of storytelling and of the magical as a presence in cinema.

2009 could well be dubbed 'the year of Apichatpong Weerasthakul' as it will involve not only the presentation of a series of new installation and film commissions but retrospectives and publications by and about him. This extended multi-platform project has the working title of Primitive and is inspired by Joe’s researches in the north-east of Thailand, focussing on the village of Nabua. It takes further his pre-occupations with memory and re-incarnation while exploring the hidden history of oppression of the people of the region and in particular the current teenage generation.

An ambitious multi-screen installation will be the centrepiece of the Primitive project. It includes a music video and features the teens of Nabua and an interview with a monkey ghost. The installation will be presented at Munich's Haus der Kunst from 20 February to 17 May and then at FACT in Liverpool from 25 September to 29 November, followed by other international presentations in 2010. This multi-platform work has been commissioned by the Haus der Kunst, FACT and Animate Projects, London, and is being produced by Apichatpong’s Thai company, Kick the Machine, with Illuminations Films, London.

As well as the installation there will be a short film entitled Primitive: A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, which will be presented in two versions, one for cinema or television, the other to be on-line on the website of Animate Projects. And both versions will premiere to coincide with the opening of the installation in Munich in February. The film is in the form of a letter from a man who can recall his past lives and who will also be a central character in the forthcoming feature by Apichatpong, which Illuminations Films is preparing for production in 2009.

Throughout March and April, substantial retrospective screenings of Apichatpong Weerasthakul’s feature films, short films and other single screen works will be presented at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin and the Munich Film Museum. To accompany these screenings, the Austrian Film Museum, will be publishing the first monograph in English on his work, edited by James Quandt. It will include contributions by Quandt, Benjamin Anderson, Mark Cousins, Tony Rayns, Kong Rithdee and Tilda Swinton with additional writings by Apichatpong himself. Wallflower Press will distribute the monograph internationally.

Another unique part of this complex project will be, Primitive, an artist’s book, with an extensive selection of interviews that Apichatpong has gathered with the people of the north-east region of Thailand, around their memories and experiences. These will be combined with a photo-documentation of the teens of Nabua. The book will be published in English by Edizioni Zero in Milan and also to coincide with the Munich opening of the Primitive installation in February.

Peter Sellars, the inspiration of the New Crowned Hope project for whom Illuminations Films co-produced Syndromes and a Century wrote,

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of a new generation of filmmakers who is inventing film completely in a new cultural context. We think, in the West, we know what film can do. Apichatpong creates film as an incantation, as a magic spell, as a shaman sequence where you actually have images that penetrate your life and body in very unexpected ways. The question in the 21st century is: what can film accomplish, what are the possibilities of the medium that we have barely explored?

We will, hopefully, gain further revelations of this during 'the year of Apichatpong Weerasthakul', throughout 2009 and into 2010, when the new feature film is scheduled for completion. What has become increasingly clear to my colleague Simon Field and I is that in this complex distribution and exhibition marketplace, it is not enough to produce a highly intelligent international art movie to stand on its own and just allow it to “walk the plank”.

What the Primitive project is attempting to do is to build around the production and release of such innovative work an international event that can draw people into the works from many different entrances and perspectives across the world. It is a bold experiment and we will be learning as we go.

Update: Jacqui Davies writes about the shoot in Thailand on the Animate Projects blog here.

Images of Apichatpong Weerasthakul on location for Primitive, courtesy and © Jacqui Davies, Animate Projects.