Mysterious object at noon

Drawing on the Surrealist storytelling technique known as Exquisite Corpse, wherein a variety of writers would contribute to a story one sentence at a time, without knowing much about what the previous sentences contained “Mysterious object at noon” is a fragmented, open-ended anti-narrative. Thai independent filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul used the technique to interview people throughout Thailand, learning a little bit about their lives and then asking them to contribute to the film’s evolving story. What emerges is at once a portrait of Thailand’s disenfranchised lower classes - farmers, fruit vendors, village performers of “mor lam” (a song-and-storytelling hybrid extremely popular in the rural northeast) - and a fractured group-narration of a story about a handicapped boy and his tutor, a woman named Dogfar. The finished story was then shot in dramatic form, using nonprofessional actors, and intercut with the earlier footage. An experimental mix of documentary and fiction, this highly unusual and unconventional work challenges defined notions of authorship, authenticity, genre cinema and narrative.