Ashes is a experimental film built through drifting. Apichatpong Weerasethakul does not organize images into a linear narrative; instead, he allows the film to wander, letting sequences emerge and dissolve as if guided by attention rather than plot. Meaning is produced through movement, proximity, and duration – through the simple act of passing from one image to the next. Like memory itself, the film takes shape as a collage of moments rather than a story: a walk through a village with a dog, a woman painting her nails, brief encounters with everyday life.

This gentle wandering is interrupted by sharper political images, including protests against Thailand’s Article 112, the lèse-majesté law that suppresses freedom of expression. The film’s drifting structure becomes a way of holding together intimacy and violence, the personal and the collective, without forcing them into resolution.

Created in collaboration with Lomo and MUBI to launch the portable LomoKino camera, Ashes embraces a tactile, lo-fi aesthetic that reinforces its method: filmmaking as observation, as wandering, as a practice of staying with images long enough for them to resonate. Through this meandering approach, Weerasethakul turns everyday perception into a quiet meditation on memory, erasure, and the fragile persistence of lived experience.__

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We thought that our spirits were enriched by the fertile soil and the greenest leaves and the rarest insects and the abundance of humility. But came a day in March we woke up from our dream. The sky wept ashes. The rotten ground trembled as baby worms rose to taste the gray snow. Across the mountains the light of devotion shone and blinded our souls. The darkness was so bright we wept and shouted in silence. And we woke up again, and again.

We united like multiple King Kongs with no sound. Every heartbeat a baby was born with her mouth shut tight like a touch of two stones. With pleasure we lived in hope, and hoped to never wake up.
A land of Nothing.
We slept.
We smiled.
We ran. (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)