The first big prize for a Thai film this year belongs to Jakrawal Nilthamrong. On the weekend, Jakrawal's Vanishing Point won a Tiger Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), a Dutch cine-event known for championing young filmmakers with edgy visions.
Director Jakrawal Nilthamrong accepts the Tiger Award for his film Vanishing Point, at International Film Festival Rotterdam, on Friday.
The prize is customarily given to three films. Sharing the victory this year were La Obra Del Siglo, by Cuban director Carlos M Quintela, and Videophilia (And Other Viral Syndromes) directed by Juan Daniel F Molero, from Peru.
"I wasn't confident that I would win the prize. The screenings weren't full, except just one," said Jakrawal, by phone from Holland. "And I thought there were stronger films in the competition."
Jakrawal, 38, is also a film lecturer at Thammasart University. For more than 10 years, his experimental, non-narrative short films and documentaries as well as installation art pieces, have helped Jakrawal make a name for himself on the independent circuit.
His interest in visual elasticity, optical illusion and Buddhist-tinged philosophical musings on time, history, and transformative elements have been reflected in films such as Stone Cloud (about a giant slab of stone), Unseen Forest (shot in Zambia with Zambian filmmakers), Zero Gravity (a haunting short film told from the point of view of a dead person in a historically troubled area).
Vanishing Point is Jakrawal's first feature-length film, and also one that has a storyline.
The film was inspired by a striking newspaper image the director saw as a child.
The photograph show a car that had been crushed, folded up like an accordion, after being involved in an accident.
"It's was a real image on the front page of a newspaper in 1983. The car belonged to my parents," said Jakrawal.
"One of my relatives cut out that picture from a newspaper and put it in my room, and I grew up looking at it every day. Originally I didn't want to make a film about it, but once I started writing a script I realised my inspiration came from my parents' accident."
His father had stopped his car without noticing that the vehicle's nose jutted onto a railway track. A train approached and hit it. His parents survived, but their lives were never the same.
Vanishing Point opens with that newspaper image, then moves on to follow two men, a motel owner and a journalist, each going through his own existential adventure. We later see a monk who goes on about his dream and the possibility of karmic fate the characters must confront. There is a coherent plot, but the film has a dreamlike quality, with time shifts and image fragments punctuating the narrative.
"I didn't think much about 'form', and I did most things through instinct," said Jakrawal. "I like experimental films, so that's how the film turned out. There's also the influence of video art that I've seen. The plot was even thinner in the first draft, but I decided to make it clearer."
IFFR is known for its support of Southeast Asian filmmakers, although the competition is an arena for films worldwide. Two Thai films have previously won the Tiger Award — Aditya Assarat's Wonderful Town (2007) and Anocha Suwichakornpong's Mundane History (2009).
A scene from Vanishing Point.
