Dan Koh: Demos was released in 2016, in the wake of the 2014 Thai coup d'état. Would you say that it still evokes the political landscape of 2020 Bangkok, especially under the current state of emergency?

Danaya Chulphuthiphong: Before the 2014 coup d’état, we already faced the curfew from the 2010 Bangkok massacre. As we were under the military junta's law from 2014 until the 2019 election, we could not express much of our opinions and could easily be put in jail for even small actions. The fear, and our life in cages, has continued for more than 10 years now. But now the atmosphere in Thailand is changing. Fear is replaced by anger; hibernation is turned into awakening. When I was making Demos, I hoped for this kind of energy. At the end, I hope that the animals won’t have to be in the zoo anymore. I don’t think this pandemic can harm the notion of freedom in Thailand and in the world.

DK: I'm interested in how Demos, despite its anthropological/political title, prominently features a cast of beautiful, rather bizarre, and threatening reptilian lives. With your BA in Archaeology, and MFA in Visual Arts, how do you approach your filmic representation of biodiversity?

DC: First of all, the appearance of the non-human creatures in my film starts with my uncomfortable feelings in communicating with people. I don’t know how to deal with a large number of cast and crew to make a film, or how to direct humans to act. I just follow my instincts in investigating my surroundings. I feel more connection with another species in making my works.

Many animals and humans deal with power in quite similar ways—there are the pack leaders who seize power, and the rest with lesser power. To live together we have to balance the power between species. We all have different functions and we have the right to live well and with dignity. Rebalancing is really important. Homo sapiens is quite a new species, dating back only around 300,000 years ago. Many species have come and gone; it’s normal if this is going to happen to humans too.

DK: Listening to Demos, I felt like time and space were closing in, almost like in Tomás Saraceno's Arachnid Orchestra, or even the drone/doom of early Earth. It was surprising to me that some of the sounds of the film were compiled from the collaborative database Freesound.org. What were your intention in making the film’s soundscape? What was the process like—recording, locating other sounds, and matching them to the images?

DC: I realised that my process is metaphorically somewhere between editing for a photo essay and making a collage work. Basically, I shoot things in my surroundings, or something interesting, without a specific plan. I collect these images and sounds. Sometimes, I try to adjust the speeds of a sound clip using a high-cut filter or reverb to turn it into a strange, interesting background, which gives me ideas for the next shot or scene.

In my first short film, Night Watch (2015), I did all of the work myself without any knowledge in sound recording and sound design. So I found that Freesound.org is one of the great open-source databases of sounds that anyone can use under the Creative Commons licenses.

For Demos, I worked with filmmaker, artist, and musician Pathompon “Mont” Tesprateep, who helped me to expand my ideas and edited the sound details. We tried out sounds such as outer space, underwater, deep jungle, and laser beam. Somehow, I tried to reflect the awkward and surrealistic atmosphere made by the military junta since the 2014 coup d’état. The drone sound came up naturally with the pacing of images. It may convey my own frustration and anger for the situation in my country. I feel like we have to hold our breath for as long as we can, under this never-ending, black, and heavy water.

DK: What about your relationship with forms and genres? Demos contains still and moving images, plus moving images that temporarily turn into stills. Some photographs are from news and science websites, while you reference in your Director's Statement Neal Ulevich's infamous photo of the 1976 Thammasat University massacre. Given your background in personal documentary photography, and recent award-winning cinematography for other's fiction/experimental short films, I wonder if you think we are truly liberated from the "tyranny of genres"?

DC: I don't really have a concept of genre for my work, but in a practical way, genres can be useful. It may depend on a platform or a context for the work to be shown. I can only make things the way I can. Perhaps my work is something that makes me calm down from my anxiety toward the situation in my country.

When making a film, I see no difference between photographs and moving images. We live in an era of overwhelming visual content. Most of the information we consume every day are both moving and still images, and beyond. I'm obsessed with gazing, capturing moments through cameras and lenses. A moment can be a blink or a long one. Using found images and documentations gives me a way to explore some ideas of time in relation to historical evidence and my personal being and memory. The layers on my editing’s timeline intertwine with my collected mental and physical materials. It’s finally a personal scrapbook of anger. A note to the history that hasn’t been told and will disappear.

Thanks to Tulapop Saenjaroen

Credits

Demos
Danaya Chulphuthiphong, 2016

Producer: Danaya Chulphuthiphong
Camera: Danaya Chulphuthiphong
Editing: Danaya Chulphuthiphong, Pathompon Tesprateep
Sound: Danaya Chulphuthiphong, Pathompon Tesprateep