Waking Dream

Comments (0) By Michael Fox Wednesday, Jun 18 2008

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The demarcation between fiction and life — between stories and experience — grows fuzzier every day. Consider the groaning shelf of fake memoirs, not to mention lonelygirl15. The gifted young Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Syndromes and a Century) takes singular pleasure in blending fact and fable, notably in the staggering quantity of experimental shorts he’s produced in the last 15 years. The two-part series Mysterious Objects: The Short Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul provides a tasty sampling of the filmmaker’s range. In the captivating “Worldly Desires,” Apichatpong (or Joe, as his fans in the West call him) alternates between a lithe girl and her four backup singers miming a winsome pop song in the middle of the woods and a movie crew filming a drama about a pair of lovers fleeing through the same forest. “Malee and the Boy” pairs the apocryphal tale of a materialistic mother who ends up losing her daughter, related in text scrolling down the screen, with ambiguous footage of Bangkok street life. Joe’s films lend themselves to the viewer’s impulse to play detective and decipher seemingly random clues. They also invite you to simply get lost in someone else’s dreams.
Thu., July 3, 7:30 p.m.; Sun., July 6, 2 p.m., 2008