• Ablaze
  • Free Radicals
  • Valentin de las Sierras

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Una’s Lecture

In Conversation

  • Hilton Als is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of The Women, White Girls, and My Pinup. His most recent curatorial project was Joan Didion: What She Means for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Als is also a teaching professor at UC Berkeley.

For the Townsend Center for the Humanities’s Una’s Lecture, Apichatpong Weerasethakul appears in conversation with Hilton Als, who inquires into his career arc, filmmaking practice, and the particular political challenges involved in making film in his native Thailand. Als also explores whether his film practice changed with the making of Memoria (2021), Weerasethakul’s first film set outside of Thailand, looking into whether that film and its reception (it received the Cannes Film Festival’s Jury Prize) has altered the kinds of work he wants to make in the future. The talk includes screenings of two films from the BAMPFA collection that inspired Weerasethakul’s practice, Len Lye’s Free Radicals and Bruce Baillie’s Valentin de las Sierras, as well as Weerasethakul’s Ablaze.

Films in this Screening

Free Radicals

Len Lye, United States, 1958, revised 1979

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 16mm
  • 4 mins
source
  • BAMPFA

Valentin de las Sierras

Bruce Baillie, United States, Mexico, 1967

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • 16mm
  • 9 mins
source
  • BAMPFA

Ablaze

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, Singapore, 2016

FILM DETAILS 
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 5 mins
source
  • Kick the Machine Films