Tulapop Saenjaroen’s darkly funny and breathtakingly original films offer incisive commentaries on work, leisure, tourism, and self-care in today’s relentless culture of self-improvement. Borrowing elements from social media, meditation apps, virtual assistants, and cinema history, Saenjaroen’s works also ponder the ways proliferating media imagery shapes our inner and outer lives. In the award-winning A Room with a Coconut View (2018), artificial intelligences attempt to explore the Thai resort town of Bangsaen through video tours and tourist snaps before going off the existential rails. In People on Sunday (2020), Saenjaroen considers the labor of leisure in this homage to the 1930 German film Menschen Am Sonntag. Squish! (2021) meditates on the self through lurid and liquid forms, filtered through the history of Thai animation. Notes from the Periphery (2021) explores the peripheral spaces of labor, trade, and everyday political resistance in the port city of Laem Chabang in Chon Buri, Thailand.
Festivals, Awards, & Nominations
Locarno International Film Festival
International Film Festival Rotterdam
Oberhausen International Short Film Festival
Singapore International Film Festival
Images Festival
Moscow International Experimental Film Festival
Tulapop Saenjaroen (SAIC 2009) is an artist and filmmaker based in Bangkok. His recent works interrogate the correlations between image production and production of subjectivity as well as the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom in late capitalism. Saenjaroen's works have been shown internationally in exhibitions and screenings including the Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, Curtas Vila do Conde, 25 FPS in Zagreb, Kasseler DokFest, Vancouver International Film Festival, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Display gallery in Prague, and Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, among many others. He has won awards from Winterthur, Jakarta, Moscow, and Thailand. He holds a master of fine arts in fine art media from the Slade School of Fine Art, a master of arts in aesthetics and politics from California Institute of the Arts, and a bachelor of arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mundane History (Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2009) with Nightfall (Tulapop Saenjaroen and Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2016)
Theatrical Screening
Saturday, October 23, 5:00 pm
Anocha Suwichakornpong, Tulapop Saenjaroen, and Pom Bunsermvicha in Conversation with Melika Bass
Friday, October 22, 6:00 p.m.
Virtual Event
Closed captions available
Updated COVID-19 Protocols
Dear Friends,
We care deeply about the well-being and safety of our audiences and staff. With the recent rise of COVID-19 cases, we are updating our health and safety procedures to require proof of full vaccination* or a negative result on a COVID PCR test for all screenings and events at the Film Center.
We know it can be hard to enjoy a movie without knowing the status of the folks sitting close to you. Our hope is that these new procedures will allow you to relax and view our films in the way they’re meant to be seen--with your undivided attention to the screen.
Beginning on Friday, September 10, you will need a valid photo ID and one of the following items to gain entry to the Film Center:
- Physical vaccination card
- A legible photo, copy, or scan of your card; an image on your phone will be acceptable provided that it is legible
- Proof of a negative result on a COVID PCR test conducted within 72 hours of the film or event start time
*Full vaccination means any vaccine for COVID-19 which has received full or emergency use approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or World Health Organization (WHO). Individuals are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after they have received the second dose in a two-dose series or a single dose from a one-dose series of a COVID-19 vaccine authorized for use by the FDA or WHO.
You will need to show proof of vaccination status or a negative PCR test result as you enter the theater.
Children under 12 will not be permitted in the theater, since they are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine.
In addition, the Film Center will continue to implement the following safety protocols:
- In accordance with the Governor's recent Executive Order, all patrons and staff will be required to wear a mask covering their nose and mouth at all times while in the theater
- Staggered showtimes and ample time between shows to mitigate crowds
- Ticket pre-orders for films encouraged to reduce lines and guarantee seats
- Hand sanitizer and disposable face masks available for patrons
- Only 80% of our tickets will be available for sale
- No eating or drinking will be permitted in the theater; no concessions will be sold
The Film Center reserves the right to require patrons who do not follow these procedures to leave the theater immediately.
As always, if you are feeling unwell for any reason, please stay home and stream films instead of joining us at the theater. We are happy to refund or exchange your ticket for another time. In addition, please understand that while these updated procedures are intended to mitigate the potential spread of COVID-19, there is nonetheless inherent risk to exposure in any indoor space where others are present. Those entering the theater do so at their own risk to such exposure.
If you have already purchased a ticket for a screening on Friday, September 10 (or beyond) but are unable to comply with these new procedures, please contact us at filmcenter@saic.edu for a refund.
We appreciate your cooperation and support as we continue to navigate the ever-changing COVID landscape.
See you at the movies!
--Your Friends at the Film Center
A Room with a Coconut View tells a story of Kanya, a tour guide and hotel rep automated voice, who leads her foreign automated-voice guest Alex through a deceptively aestheticized beach town in the east of Thailand. Dissatisfied by the sanitized tourist images, Alex decides to explore alone. Local corruption becomes intertwined with the history of Thai cinema, and Alex begins to question how images have been used to mediate his understanding of the world.
People on Sunday is a reinterpretation, a response, and an homage to the 1930 German silent film Menschen Am Sonntag. The original film was one of the first to promote itself as “a film with no actors,” employing only amateur actors and non-actors on Sundays, their days off. In Saenjaroen’s version, shot in the context of contemporary Thailand, moving image-related workers are employed in a performance-art video project about free time.
Squish! is a meditation on the self through lurid and liquid forms, filtered through both old and foreseeable technology informed by Thai animation history and contemporary culture. Centered around a fictionalized antidepressant app programmed to encourage users to move body and mind, Squish! also meditates on movement of all kinds—psychological, physical, and political.
Mainly shot in the peripheral areas of the ever-expanding Laem Chabang port city in Chon Buri, Thailand, Notes from the Periphery explores themes of territoriality, globalized networks, and ownership, weaving together a meditation on the life cycle of barnacles with images of trade, fishermen, and shipping containers used as barricades against demonstrators in Bangkok.