Ashes (Weerasethakul, 2012)Joe experiments with the LomoKino camera. I'm not really sure what it's all about or if it's even about something specific. All I know is that it gave me the same wonderful simultaneously happy and wistful feeling I get from watching his films. His pet themes are certainly present here - the bifurcated structure, repetition and contrast, a sense of loss and memory and of course, fireworks and jokes!
There also seems to be some political stuff, particularly in reference to Thailand's Lèse-Majesté law which has been in the
news lately when a 61-year old man was imprisoned for purportedly sending text messages that were deemed offensive to the monarchy and he ended up dying in prison.
Joe's approach with the camera is certainly playful. It's all rather jerky at the start as we follow a man walking a dog. But even there, he manages to do some really interesting thing like making sunlight look like a ghostlike apparition walking alongside people. He plays around with horizontal splitscreens and overlapping images. Some really fun use of music and bird sounds as well. Just Joe goodness <3.