It has been a long time since the name of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thai author of transcendent filmic dreams, was no longer exclusively associated with the theaters that made him known, following the Palme d’Or won at Cannes in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee, the one who remembers his past lives. Lately, the 51-year-old artist, who has always alternated media, more readily sailed from galleries to museums, exhibiting himself all over the world (the performance Fever Room in 2016 at the Théâtre des Amandiers-Nanterre; the exhibition Periphery of the Night at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Villeurbanne).
Memoria marks an expected return to the big screen, six years later Cemetery of Splendor (2015) and a deeper break with his country. “ In Thailand, it is becoming more and more difficult to make films freely because of the military dictatorship “, confirms the one who had to do battle with local censorship several times. “I thought a lot about working beyond borders and Memoria was a first step in this direction. “
In fact, this new film was filmed in Colombia, on another continent, poles apart from the places and faces that usually populate his cinema. “The idea to shoot there came before I even went there, he said, but I didn’t really take her seriously. The very name of Colombia aroused in me a flood of images: Amazonia, shamanism… Once there, I was taken by the desire to document these places. I started by writing a lot, photographing, meeting artists. “ The first part of the film, before relocating to the mountains, takes place in Bogota. “ The architecture of the city impressed me a lot, concedes the artist, a graduate in architecture. The way in which the light walks there, diffuse but always changing, like the reflections of the sea. “
“Sensory experience”
But the strong gesture of Memoria is undoubtedly to rehabilitate the sound part of cinema, a dimension without contours which carries with it whole sections of the imagination. “My first approach to Colombia was to walk at random, sit in such and such a place, and listen”, says the filmmaker. “ Listening to traffic, the language I didn’t understand, the sounds of nature. All these amalgamated sounds made up a fascinating material. They gave me an idea of the country where I was, something abstract. “ The character played by Tilda Swinton suffers from a strange symptom: an explosive tinnitus that echoes at any time in her head. “I myself experienced such a symptom, actually listed, a sort of sleep disorder, specifies the director. But I didn’t experience it in a traumatic way like in the film. For me, it was an interesting sensory experience, kind of a question my body was asking me. “
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