Aroonpheng's 'Burning Giants' Premieres at Venice Orizzonti — SkimNews
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- Phuttiphong Aroonpheng premiered his third film 'The Burning Giants' in Venice's Orizzonti sidebar, six years after his second feature 'Manta Ray' won that same section in 2018.
- Porlajee 'Billy' Rakchongcharoen, a Karen Indigenous rights activist and community spokesperson, was murdered in 2014 after his mountain-dwelling community in west Thailand was forcibly evicted by Thai authorities, with arson reportedly used as a dispersal method.
- Cinematographer Emo Weemhoff shot 'The Burning Giants' in fog-strewn forests and purple skies, framing the Karen displacement story as a woozy, ayahuasca-hazed dystopian mystery.
- The film's narrative pivots between a detained indigenous man named Yak, a motorbike romance involving cop Lak and his sweetheart Aepoh, and Karen kinswoman Aeva searching a decayed village, before detouring into ancient mountain deities.
- Score composers Christine Ott and Mathieu Gabry score a hidden underground world of golden-lit warriors and a tusked ogre that revisits the assimilation theme in supernatural register.
- Critics noted the film is 'arcane to a fault' with a 'flat rhythm,' though Variety praised its 'defiantly elliptical' approach that refuses to hand-hold non-Thai viewers through its cryptic structure.
Why it matters: Aroonpheng's third feature marks a step beyond the 'Manta Ray' breakthrough, but the reviewer's verdict — ambitious elliptical worldbuilding undercut by a flat rhythm and over-repetition of its assimilation theme — frames the Orizzonti competition as a letdown relative to 2018's win. For international viewers, the film functions as a coded memorial for the silenced Rakchongcharoen case, where state crimes against the Karen were 'denied and ignored.'
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