Last year’s Palme D’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul is reportedly lining up his follow up to his Cannes-prize-winning “Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives” with a project simply known as “Mekong Hotel.”
Details in the ScreenDaily piece are skimpy on what the story will actually entail but the project definitely sounds like the director’s gestating project with thespian Tilda Swinton which was noted to center on the eponymous river and “address the relationship between man and water, the catastrophic flooding which is blamed on Chinese dams and diseases spread by industrial-scale pig farming.”
“It’s definitely not going to be a film that will just have a foreign movie star for the sake of it,” Weerasethakul previously told the Guardian. “It’s going to be an exchange of ideas, of images, of … I don’t know. It’s like a game for me: the river, the pigs, and Tilda Swinton.” It won’t be first time the director has explored the Mekong (the river which runs through his native Thailand as well as Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) with one of his shorter projects, “Luminous People,” centering on a man’s journey on the river scattering the ashes of his dead father. That effort was part of one segment of the 2007 omnibus film, “State Of The World.”
“Mekong Hotel” will reunite Weerasethakul with Illuminations Films‘ Keith Griffiths and Simon Field, who teamed with the Thai director on “Syndromes And A Century” as well as ‘Uncle Boonmee.’ No word just yet on when production could get underway — or if Swinton is still being sought for the part — though the project’s development is noted as still being at an early stage.