‹Fever Room›, the first stage production of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, was premiered in the Opening Festival of Asia Culture Center Theater in 2015.
In ‹Fever Room›, the director takes us back to the origins of the cinematographic and theatrical imagination: the cave, an intoxicating space wherein reality and fiction encounter one another. Weerasethakul makes the dream three-dimensional. He plays with hypnotic lighting and sound effects, multiplies screens and frames, and projects filmic illusions onto a curtain of fog. He places the spectators in the centre of the image and infects them with a feverish virus, until they lose their way. The universe is poised to collapse and we are stuck in a mesmerising dream world on the brink of the subconscious.
Cast: Jenjira Pongpas, Banlop Lomnoi, Teenagers of Nabua
Shot in Khon Kaen, Chaiyapum, Nakhon Phanom
1st Assistant Director: Sompot Chidgasornpongse
Cinematographer: Chatchai Suban
Camera Assistant: Thanayos Roopkhajorn
Project’s Production Manager: Chai Siris
Visual Designer, Supervisor: Rueangrit Suntisuk (Duck Unit)
Lighting Designer: Pornpan Arayaveerasid
Sound Designers: Koichi Shimizu & Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr
Sound Assistant: Chalermrat Kaweewattana
Finance: Parichart Pu-aree
Post Supervisor: Lee Chatametikool
Produced by the Asia Culture Center Theater
First Performed in Gwangju, South Korea, at the Asia Culture Center Theater, September 4, 2015
To the Thai film artist resiliently maintaining his “independent” status for years of international recognition, the technical apparatus we call cinema is the metaphor for and facilitator of the realm that convene the unconscious and history, dreams and myths. His and his actors’ varied memories, intermingled with private fantasies and actual events, become the materials for his cinematic montage that seeps into the spectators’ own palette of memories and fantasies. He searches beyond the logos of the Western cinema for the crystals of heterochronic time, in which the modern technology of cinema meets primal senses. His works serve as a time-machine to access the pre-modern sates of being as well as a spatial shelter of the living scars of the civil war. He has expanded his work to stage with the commission from the Asia Culture Center Theater in 2015.