Acclaimed artist-filmmakers Bêka & Lemoine take us to Bangkok on a one day hectic journey through the chaotic concrete jungle of the South-Asian megacity. Led by the moving personal story of Boonserm Premthada, one of today’s most important Thai architects, the film unfolds through a free wander, punctuated by stunning encounters, events and places, which have contributed to shape Premthada’s unique identity and sensibility.
Deaf from birth, the architect evokes how his disability led him to develop an alternative way of listening using his whole body as a resonance chamber of sound vibrations. Despite their large ears, elephants also perceive sound mostly through their feet. Learning from elephants, Boonserm has developed an architecture of the senses where sound vibrations become the voice of space.
Walking through the dark streets of the slum where he grew up, flying to remote rural communities living in symbiosis with elephants, and observing old ladies’ devotion towards the buddhist monks of their village, the film reveals, through impressive sequences, the architect’s active commitment to work with people for whom architecture can have a strong social impact.
When a road movie merges with a film diary, here comes the one of a kind style of Bêka & Lemoine’s performative cinema.
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“Bêka & Lemoine are film poets with an ease and a grasp of the craft in both film and architecture. They are never afraid of challenging the audience and therefore dare to hold a scene
until illumination and poetry show up.” - Politiken
“So moving, intimate, poetic and beautiful!” Designboom
“A hand to hand with the tropical heat and the endless means of transport of Bangkok that
makes this film very physical, just like the space is for Boonserm Premthada. A film to listen
less with the ears or watch with the eyes but more to feel with the body.” Esquire
“This incredible film tells how disability leads an architect to listen and feel space in a different way, learning from elephants that “despite their large ears they perceive sound with their
feet through the vibrations of the ground”. ArchDaily
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* Special Mention, Milano Design Film Festival, MDFF 2022
OFFICIAL SELECTION: | FIFA, Montreal 2023, Docaviv, Tel Aviv 2023, CAFx, Copenhagen 2022
| MDFF, Milan 2022 | Wonderfruit, Thailand, 2022 | Triennale di Bruges, 2024 | SIAFF Seoul
Architecture Film Festival, 2024
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Color, 93 min.
Language: English, with English Subtitles