36

Sai, who works on a film crew, meets Oom, an art director, during a production. They go scouting locations together, they talk, they take photographs. Then the relationship ends without going anywhere. Years later Sai wants to get at the photographs from that period, but the hard drive has failed; nothing can be recovered. Only what she remembers is left. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit writes and directs. The form comes from the title: thirty six scenes, each a single fixed shot. The camera never moves and every scene is taken in one take. Thirty six refers to the number of frames on a roll of film. The subject is memory becoming digital. As taking photographs got easier, keeping them got harder; the film tells this through a loss of data. It was made very cheaply and is short, about sixty eight minutes. The fixed shots give the narrative distance; the characters' faces are often far away and conversations continue outside the frame. Nawapol is a known figure in independent Thai cinema and this is his first feature; his later films also work at data, the internet and memory. Who it is for: viewers who like conceptual independent film and the experimental strand of Asian cinema. Who it is not for: nothing happens, the form is demanding, and the fixed shot scheme will tire some viewers.