Business Finance Media Technology Policy Wealth Insights Interviews

Art Art Fairs Art Market Art Reviews Auctions Galleries Museums Interviews

Lifestyle Nightlife & Dining Style Travel Interviews

Power Lists Nightlife & Dining Art A.I. PR

About About Observer Advertise With Us Reprints

Screening at Venice: Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s ‘The Burning Giants’

This abstract Thai drama about forest clearings gives way to a lucid exposé of national myths.

Disguised by straightforward drama, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Yak Mai (The Burning Giants) reveals staggering abstractions, which lure you deeper into its political labyrinth. The Thai filmmaker draws on myth and cultural identity to spin a languid tale of mountainous smoke causing mysterious burns, and the ethnic minority subsequently made a scapegoat. Its echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic are overt, but Aroonpheng’s aim reaches wider and deeper, yielding audiovisual poetry that speaks to contemporary national moods, and to the repetitions of history.

Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter

Thank you for signing up!

By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.

Through a prologue presented out of time, an empty theatre space collects a nebulous mist, which it sends spiraling upward through its vents, and into Thailand’s western forests outside Bangkok. While the film eventually returns to this imagined site, in its closing salvo, it gives way to a tale of tyrannical oppression, as a villager with discolored cheeks (Awat Ratanapintha) is chased down by armed and masked Thai police in the mountains. They strip him of his shirt to reveal what looks like vitiligo, but which they refer to as “burns”—an apparent sign of a recent infection spreading through the area—so they take him into custody, though not before torching his home.

Along the way, the KN95 of their chief, Sompong (Teerawat Mulvilai), comes loose, exposing him to the nearby smoke and gradually covering his torso in actual burn marks. Over several days, these scars release magical flames—a kind of searing in........

© Observer