Nominated for the EMAF Media Art Award of the Association of German Film Critics (VdFk)

German premiere

Thai, English with English subtitles

Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, Local Sensations opens a loose, playful dialogue with Chatri Prakitnonthakan’s essay How to Design a Modern Monument that Won’t Become a Shrine. Rather than illustrating the text, the film generates pluralities – unravelling the dichotomy of object and subject – and gestures toward a kind of topological politics. Though it circles around ideas of monuments, monumentality, and sanctification in Thai society, no statues or literal monuments ever appear. Instead, the film drifts through an arborist’s walking tour, a glassblowing workshop, a drawing game among architecture students, a multi-instrument improviser, a recreation centre with its non-human inhabitants, and a snow town in a theme park. These fragments, only obliquely connected, are woven into an evolving, gently destabilising field of sensation. Together, they form an ecological and metaphysical nexus – an invitation to reconsider what “locality” and “monumentality” might mean, and how close they are to us.

• Sektion Section: Film
• Programm Programme: In the Presence of Form