36

While scouting locations for a film, Sai strikes up a relationship with Oom, the art director, at one of the future sites. Several years later, she searches in vain for the traces of their encounter on a recalcitrant hard disk, as if the photos she had taken were the only proof of their encounter – 36 stills (like the 36 frames of the old camera rolls?). Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit questions the memory of the digital age. From the derelict building at the beginning, which is also a place full of memories, to shots that leave the characters on the edge of the frame, this minimalist narrative bustles around a vacuum (the ties between Sai and Oom have been cut) and a loss (a local girl, who has since died). And yet, with its highly delicate rhythm, it encompasses much more than this almost-nothingness, and shows us the danger of replacing our feelings by images. It questions our mechanical habit of storing our images, our insistence on confusing what we have actually lived with the traces that we keep of it. Charlotte Garson