The soldiers in a hospital are in deep sleep. The kings of yore are in need of them. The nurse learns this from the two goddesses at the shrine in the park during lunch. She is surprised and incredulous. As are we, the audience. But nobody is being tricked here – it’s only the latest film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand’s most outstanding director.
A film that respects no boundaries between fact and fantasy. Cemetery of Splendor talks of a love between those dreaming and those awake. The story is set in Khon Kaen, a city in the northeast of Thailand where the director’s parents worked as doctors and in which he was born in 1970. In a film that is made of an ambiguous, dreamlike fabric, this autobiographical or semi-documentary level is yet another thread woven into it. For one cannot ignore the political situation of this country, which has been under military rule since 2014, when the spiritual practices of the protagonists’ everyday life is shown. It is precisely this merging of individual existence and social structure that turns Weerasethakul’s films into a visionary, but most of all a human, cinema.
