A luxury car glides down a jungle road at night. Inside are a young Elvis impersonator and a mysterious woman. They drive on through the darkness, as the man begins to whistle ...
So begins Graceland, one of the films screening in the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival's Asian Shorts programme today. Although it's only 17 minutes long, the short packs an emotional punch, and highlights the talent of its director, Anocha Suwichakornpong. When Graceland this year became the first Thai short film to be selected for Cannes, it turned the film-school graduate into one of the leading hopes of Thai art cinema.
In person, Suwichakornpong (below) seems younger than her 30 years. Perhaps it's her cropped haircut, which evokes the gamine look of Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, or her girlish voice. But this cutesy exterior belies her maturity and the long journey it took to get behind the camera.
On the phone from Bangkok, Suwichakornpong says she never expected to become a filmmaker. Growing up around Pattaya, where her parents ran a jewellery business, she had an early interest in art, and studied jewellery design (to help with the family trade) at university in Britain. But during further studies, film began 'bothering' her. She recalls watching Luis Bu?uel's Un Chien Andalou. 'I thought it was the weirdest film,' she says. 'It somehow stayed in my mind.'
When she was 22, watching Godard's French new wave classic Contempt sparked her desire to make films, but she pushed the thought away. Three years later, however, working in the family business, the idea kept returning. 'I thought, if I just let it go like this, when I'm 50 or 60 I will really regret it,' she says.
Which led her to Columbia University film school in New York City, and a mere two years later, to Cannes with her thesis project film. Graceland also returned 'home' in a sense in August, when Bangkok's Thai Short Film and Video Festival screened it and two other student projects in a programme dedicated to her work.