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part of
double bill #1
The Age of Anxiety
Thai Short Film & Video Festival
2013
transmediale
2018
An audiovisual meditation on the fin de siècle in Thailand. The film deconstructs hallucinatory footage of the typical 80’s Thai melodrama B-film into thousands of frantic fragments. They feel like violent stabs: disturbing memories and reinvented histories that ascend the viewer into mind-expanding views of a fragile nation on the verge of madness.
Bio Taiki Sakpisit
Filmmaker and artist Taiki Sakpisit is based in Bangkok. His works explore the tensions and conflicts in contemporary Thailand through precise and sensorially overwhelming audio-visual assemblage. Taiki has presented his experimental shorts at numerous exhibitions and festivals, including IFFR, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Dallas Contemporary, and Kunstverein Gottingen. He is currently artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.
The Age of Anxiety questions the notion of hallucinations, memories, and reality. It starts with a foreboding tone, as smoke fills the screen while frenzied music plays in the background. The antagonistic music is a constant in the film: the screams do not relent as the visuals morph into film footage of Thai B-movies from the 1980s. Made in response to the government’s merciless obliteration of the Red Shirt protesters in the 2010s, the music and flashing images are a reflection of a traumatized and anxious mental state. The line between nightmare and reality is a thin one—will the horror ever end? Amid the franticness, however, there is a yearning to escape the senselessness of it all, and a hope for freedom to break through.