Mekong Hotel
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012, 61 min

At once the portrait of a landmark and a poem of liminality, Mekong Hotel is, eponymously, set in a hotel overlooking the Mekong river. The river lies on the border of Thailand and Laos, once flooded with civil war refugees, now submerged in talks about floods in faraway Bangkok. In bedrooms and terraces, the actors play out scenes from a script about reincarnated lovers and folk spirits, reflecting on their worlds both as characters and performers. The film blends fact and fiction, spirits and humans, a flesh-eating ghost mother and her daughter, young lovers and the river, gently weaving together waves of demolition, politics, and a floating desire of the future. Using characters constantly transitioning between the real and unreal, Apichatpong contemplatively embraces the liminal, and reconstructs the dreams and darkest desires of a civilisation and its future.

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Showing as part of Deviant Traditions of Desire: Asian Cinema at the Intersection of Folklore and Transgressive Desire