
Tulapop Saenjaroen
Directing
Biography
Tulapop Saenjaroen (Thailand) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Bangkok. His recent works interrogate the correlations between image production and production of subjectivity as well as the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom in late capitalism. In combining narrative and the essay film genre, he investigates subjects such as tourism, self care and free labor through re-making and re-interpreting produced images and their networks. Saenjaroen received his MFA in Fine Art Media from The Slade School of Fine Art and MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts.
Known For

Aoey seeks the Pak Nam Po River - believed to reach heaven - in order to send her mother, who recently passed away, to the afterworld.
Nakorn-Sawan

Four young travelers embark on a trip to Kanchanaburi to see the museum, but pass the time in other ways when they find out it's closed for refurbishment.
Come Here

A friendship develops between a young paralysed man from a wealthy Bangkok family and his male nurse from Isan in the North of Thailand.
Mundane History

According to Thai superstition, a virgin can ward off rain by planting lemongrass upside-down underneath an open sky. This belief remains prevalent to this day. As clouds begin to gather, Piano, the young production manager on a film set, is tasked to carry out this tradition. As her fellow female co-workers shy away from the duty, Piano is left with no choice but to take on the burden of becoming the lemongrass girl.
Lemongrass Girl

Squish! is a meditation on the self through lurid and liquid forms; filtered through both old and foreseeable technology informed by Thai animation history and contemporary culture, and a constant process of constructing and deforming new selves to simulate ‘movements’. By extrapolating and redefining the terms of ‘movement’, be it through psychological, physical or political understandings, the work interweaves the medium of animation with a state of depression.
Squish!
In 2010, more than 90 civilians were killed and 2,000 injured during crackdowns on pro-democracy protests in Bangkok; to date, Thai authorities have not held any government or military officials accountable. The film reframes the experiences of survivors by filming them sharing their stories in facilitated workshops and discussing how to seek justice for their family members with a human rights lawyer.
Narrative
"Emanations (Cinema Mix) is a remix of a site-specific sound installation originally created for the exhibition at the 7th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. During a silent film screening at the festival, sounds within the cinema were discreetly recorded using multiple devices—both fixed and roaming—to capture details across varying proximities and frequencies. In this version, the composition has been re-mixed into a 5.1 surround sound system for a return to the cinema space, this time inverting the original act of listening."
Emanations (Cinema Mix)

A tour guide and also a hotel rep automated voice, Kanya, leads her foreign guest, Alex, through a beach town in the east of Thailand called Bangsaen. Since Kanya's presentation is overtly aestheticized and strictly regimented, Alex decides to explore the town by himself, fantasizing to get out of the frame.
A Room with a Coconut View

Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, Local Sensations opens a loose, playful dialogue with Chatri Prakitnonthakan’s essay, How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine. Rather than illustrating the text, the film generates pluralities—unraveling the dichotomy of object and subject—and gestures toward a kind of topological politics.
Local Sensations

A story about storytelling: After returning to his hometown to work in his sister’s fruit processing factory, Earth slowly but surely pulls out of the family business to dedicate himself to writing an abstract, gory novel.
Mangosteen

“The Return” is an attempt by the artist to recall his lost memories of his father who died in the car accident in 1991 when the artist was almost five years old. Personal family photographs from his father’s funeral are overlaid with the imagined voice by the artist himself, fictionalising that his dead father is coming back to life—a strange and moving feedback loop between father and son, between photographic documentation and deteriorating memories, between personal history and its own otherness.
The Return

Commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices Festival as an exploration into the globalised shipping networks, liminal territories and spaces of trade and labour that converge on the port city of Laem Chabang in Thailand.
Notes from the Periphery

The chronicles of a day in the life of a nameless woman as she wanders around Singapore. Part documentary part video essay, 'Nightfall' is a fictionalized account of Suwichakornpong's time spent during a residency researching Thai politics in a foreign land.
Nightfall

In this updated homage to the 1930 German silent film of the same title, Thai artist Tulapop Saenjaroen examines the paradox of people relaxing while being filmed. As a film shoot appears to be in perpetual delay, crew members kill time fiddling on their smartphones, all the while under the persistent gaze of the camera.