Mysterious Object at Noon

Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimen­tation to Thai cinema with his debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of his homeland through the surrealist concept of the “exquisite corpse.” Enlisting locals to contribute improvised narration to a simple tale, Weerasethakul charts the collective construction of the fiction as each new encounter imbues it with unpredictable shades of fantasy and pathos. Shot over the course of two years in black-and-white 16mm, Mysterious Object at Noon established the director’s defining fascination with the porous boundaries between the real and the imagined.