The Us coffee shop in Phatthalung will show a complete retrospective of films by Koraphat Cheeradit on 8th March. The event, organised by Phatthalung Micro Cinema, includes Koraphat’s short films ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!, Yesterday Is Another Day, Believe a Lust (Croire à un désir), Landscape of Us on Fire, and Hydrangea, amongst others.
Yesterday Is Another Day
In Yesterday Is Another Day, a high school student plays hooky and meets his girlfriend in a woodland. They take a walk, and joke about their future together, seemingly without a care in the world. But there are ominous signs of impending threats: they find a discarded handgun, and Koraphat inserts shots of a JCB digging up the forest.
Eventually, we learn that the student is being charged with lèse-majesté, for sharing Facebook posts. His court hearing is the following day, and he is likely to be jailed. (The film doesn’t state directly that he’s facing royal defamation charges, though it’s clear from the couple’s conversation: he explains that the sentence is three years per offence, which is the minimum jail term for lèse-majesté.)
The prospect of criminal charges for posting on social media is a reality for dozens of people in Thailand today, many of whom are students. As the boy in Koraphat’s film says to his girlfriend, he has to face changing from “being a teenager to being a prisoner.”
Yesterday Is Another Day and ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now! were both shown as part of the Short Film Marathon (หนังสั้นมาราธอน) in 2023. Yesterday Is Another Day was also shown at Wildtype 2023, at The Political Wanderer, and (twice) at the Chiang Mai Film Festival (เทศกาลหนังแห่งเมืองเชียงใหม่).
Eventually, we learn that the student is being charged with lèse-majesté, for sharing Facebook posts. His court hearing is the following day, and he is likely to be jailed. (The film doesn’t state directly that he’s facing royal defamation charges, though it’s clear from the couple’s conversation: he explains that the sentence is three years per offence, which is the minimum jail term for lèse-majesté.)
The prospect of criminal charges for posting on social media is a reality for dozens of people in Thailand today, many of whom are students. As the boy in Koraphat’s film says to his girlfriend, he has to face changing from “being a teenager to being a prisoner.”
Yesterday Is Another Day and ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now! were both shown as part of the Short Film Marathon (หนังสั้นมาราธอน) in 2023. Yesterday Is Another Day was also shown at Wildtype 2023, at The Political Wanderer, and (twice) at the Chiang Mai Film Festival (เทศกาลหนังแห่งเมืองเชียงใหม่).
...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!
...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!, shown at Wildtype 2024, begins with a young man stumbling around in a woodland. The aimless protagonist is filmed in a continuous take, with double-exposures constantly fading in and out. Birdsong and other bucolic, ambient sounds soon give way to a non-diegetic locomotive on the soundtrack, which gradually rises to a crescendo. Visually, this is matched by bursts of rapid-fire shots, each lasting for only a single frame, that are perceived only subliminally.
Some of these inserts are faux-naïf: white doves and heart emojis, symbolising peace and love. Other flash frames are more extreme: Koraphat juxtaposes sex and violence in split-second montages of anatomical drawings, erections, Ukrainian war casualties in Bucha, Nazi troops, and riot police firing water cannon at Thai protesters.
Some of these inserts are faux-naïf: white doves and heart emojis, symbolising peace and love. Other flash frames are more extreme: Koraphat juxtaposes sex and violence in split-second montages of anatomical drawings, erections, Ukrainian war casualties in Bucha, Nazi troops, and riot police firing water cannon at Thai protesters.
Believe a Lust
Landscape of Us on Fire
Believe a Lust is only a few minutes long, though it’s a powerful and provocative film, as it shows a novice monk masturbating in a toilet cubicle. It was shown as part of the online Short Film Marathon in 2024. Like ...Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now!, it includes some explicit subliminal imagery. Like Landscape of Us on Fire, is has beautiful black-and-white cinematography. (The poster for the Koraphat retrospective features only images from Believe a Lust and Landscape of Us on Fire.)
Landscape of Us on Fire also challenges the taboo against depicting the sexual desires of monks. In the film, a novice monk hires a prostitute, and a shot of the monk’s hand on the young prostitute’s back recalls a similar moment in Kanittha Kwunyoo’s previously banned film Karma (อาปัติ). (The gesture appears on Landscape of Us on Fire’s poster and in the Karma trailer, to highlight its transgressive nature.) Landscape of Us on Fire was shown at last year’s Isan Creative Festival (เทศกาลอีสานสร้างสรรค์) and Chiang Mai Film Festival, and in the 2024 Short Film Marathon.
The nearest equivalent to Believe a Lust and Landscape of Us on Fire is probably Watcharapol Paksri’s short film All Done in the Opposite of Afternoon [sic] (วัฏสงสาร), which was shown at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya on 8th September 2018. (Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the representation of monks in Thai films in much more detail.)
Landscape of Us on Fire also challenges the taboo against depicting the sexual desires of monks. In the film, a novice monk hires a prostitute, and a shot of the monk’s hand on the young prostitute’s back recalls a similar moment in Kanittha Kwunyoo’s previously banned film Karma (อาปัติ). (The gesture appears on Landscape of Us on Fire’s poster and in the Karma trailer, to highlight its transgressive nature.) Landscape of Us on Fire was shown at last year’s Isan Creative Festival (เทศกาลอีสานสร้างสรรค์) and Chiang Mai Film Festival, and in the 2024 Short Film Marathon.
The nearest equivalent to Believe a Lust and Landscape of Us on Fire is probably Watcharapol Paksri’s short film All Done in the Opposite of Afternoon [sic] (วัฏสงสาร), which was shown at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya on 8th September 2018. (Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the representation of monks in Thai films in much more detail.)
Hydrangea
Hydrangea takes place on the seventh anniversary of the 2014 coup. As in Yesterday Is Another Day, beneath its romantic surface lies a political subtext. The film’s credits call directly for an alternative to the ideology of the military government.
