A Room with a Coconut View tells a story of Kanya, a tour guide and hotel rep automated voice, who leads her foreign automated-voice guest Alex through a deceptively aestheticized beach town in the east of Thailand. Dissatisfied by the sanitized tourist images, Alex decides to explore alone. Local corruption becomes intertwined with the history of Thai cinema, and Alex begins to question how images have been used to mediate his understanding of the world.
--
Tulapop Saenjaroen’s darkly funny and breathtakingly original films offer incisive commentaries on work, leisure, tourism, and self-care in today’s relentless culture of self-improvement. Borrowing elements from social media, meditation apps, virtual assistants, and cinema history, Saenjaroen’s works also ponder the ways proliferating media imagery shapes our inner and outer lives. In the award-winning A Room with a Coconut View (2018), artificial intelligences attempt to explore the Thai resort town of Bangsaen through video tours and tourist snaps before going off the existential rails. In People on Sunday (2020), Saenjaroen considers the labor of leisure in this homage to the 1930 German film Menschen Am Sonntag. Squish! (2021) meditates on the self through lurid and liquid forms, filtered through the history of Thai animation. Notes from the Periphery (2021) explores the peripheral spaces of labor, trade, and everyday political resistance in the port city of Laem Chabang in Chon Buri, Thailand.
Tulapop Saenjaroen (SAIC 2009) is an artist and filmmaker 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. Saenjaroen's works have been shown internationally in exhibitions and screenings including the Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, Curtas Vila do Conde, 25 FPS in Zagreb, Kasseler DokFest, Vancouver International Film Festival, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Display gallery in Prague, and Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, among many others. He has won awards from Winterthur, Jakarta, Moscow, and Thailand. He holds a master of fine arts in fine art media from the Slade School of Fine Art, a master of arts in aesthetics and politics from California Institute of the Arts, and a bachelor of arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
- Year2018
- Runtime28 min
- LanguageThai, English subtitles
- CountryThailand
- FilmmakerTulapop Saenjaroen
A Room with a Coconut View tells a story of Kanya, a tour guide and hotel rep automated voice, who leads her foreign automated-voice guest Alex through a deceptively aestheticized beach town in the east of Thailand. Dissatisfied by the sanitized tourist images, Alex decides to explore alone. Local corruption becomes intertwined with the history of Thai cinema, and Alex begins to question how images have been used to mediate his understanding of the world.
--
Tulapop Saenjaroen’s darkly funny and breathtakingly original films offer incisive commentaries on work, leisure, tourism, and self-care in today’s relentless culture of self-improvement. Borrowing elements from social media, meditation apps, virtual assistants, and cinema history, Saenjaroen’s works also ponder the ways proliferating media imagery shapes our inner and outer lives. In the award-winning A Room with a Coconut View (2018), artificial intelligences attempt to explore the Thai resort town of Bangsaen through video tours and tourist snaps before going off the existential rails. In People on Sunday (2020), Saenjaroen considers the labor of leisure in this homage to the 1930 German film Menschen Am Sonntag. Squish! (2021) meditates on the self through lurid and liquid forms, filtered through the history of Thai animation. Notes from the Periphery (2021) explores the peripheral spaces of labor, trade, and everyday political resistance in the port city of Laem Chabang in Chon Buri, Thailand.
Tulapop Saenjaroen (SAIC 2009) is an artist and filmmaker 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. Saenjaroen's works have been shown internationally in exhibitions and screenings including the Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, Curtas Vila do Conde, 25 FPS in Zagreb, Kasseler DokFest, Vancouver International Film Festival, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Display gallery in Prague, and Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, among many others. He has won awards from Winterthur, Jakarta, Moscow, and Thailand. He holds a master of fine arts in fine art media from the Slade School of Fine Art, a master of arts in aesthetics and politics from California Institute of the Arts, and a bachelor of arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
- Year2018
- Runtime28 min
- LanguageThai, English subtitles
- CountryThailand
- FilmmakerTulapop Saenjaroen
