Quite interesting images from Mekong Hotel, an upcoming Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s movie which will screen on the Croisette next week.
Weerasethakul is no stranger to Cannes – actually he won Palme d'Or for his 2000 film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, so I guess that we're all a little bit surprised to hear that this time his new movie is attached to a Special Screening Category, and not – In Competition.
Mekong Hotel is actually is a portrait of a hotel near the Mekong River in the north-east of Thailand. The river there marks the border between Thailand and Laos. In the bedrooms and terraces, Apichatpong held a rehearsal with his crew for a movie that he wrote years ago called Ecstasy Garden.
The film shuffles different realms, fact and fiction, expressing the bonds between a vampire-like mother and her daughter, the young lovers and the river. Mekong Hotel – since it was shot at the time of the heavy flooding in Thailand – also weaves in layers of demolition, politics, and a drifting dream of the future.
But if you're confused with this synopsis part, I will just remind you that director previously explained that Mekong Hotel “…is definitely not going to be a film that will just have a foreign movie star for the sake of it. It's going to be an exchange of ideas, of images, of … I don't know. It's like a game for me: the river, the pigs and Tilda Swinton.”
The river, the pigs and… Tilda Swinton?
Count us in!
