Mysterious Object at Noon

A crew travels through Thailand asking the people it meets to tell a story. The first person begins something about a boy in a wheelchair and his teacher. The next carries on from where that stopped. The next pulls it in a different direction. The film moves through the country passing the story hand to hand, with what is told dramatised in between. Apichatpong Weerasethakul directs, in his first feature. The method comes from the surrealists' exquisite corpse: each part of a text written by someone who has not seen what came before. Weerasethakul converts it into a documentary shoot, and the result is neither documentary nor fiction. The real subject is storytelling itself. Who is telling, who is inventing, and where the line between fact and fiction falls stays permanently blurred; some of the tellers fold their own lives into the story. It was shot on 16 mm in black and white on a very small budget. For a long time no good print existed; it was restored by the World Cinema Foundation in 2013. Weerasethakul later won the Palme d'Or with Uncle Boonmee, and this first film is treated as the announcement of his whole method. Who it is for: viewers who like experimental cinema and films that think about narrative. Who it is not for: the structure is deliberately loose, the technical quality is poor, and the film arrives nowhere.