Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a filmmaker I admire for refusing every commercial shortcut. The Bangkok-born director won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and his work drifts dreamily between memory, myth and the waking world until your sense of time goes soft. He's also an installation artist, which makes him hard to categorize at all, working far outside the conventional studio system. Watching him, I get the feeling I've been led into a private universe rather than handed a plot. It's exactly this kind of uncompromising, boundary-blurring artist who pushes Asian cinema onto the world stage, and I respect him enormously for it.

Name (English)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Name (Japanese)

アピチャートポン・ウィーラセータクン

Reading

あぴちゃーとぽん・うぃーらせーたくん

Born

July 16, 1970 (age 56)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Cancer / Dog

Origin

Bangkok, Thailand

Occupation

film director / film producer / screenwriter / installation artist / director

University

Khon Kaen University

Awards & achievements

• 2014 Yanghyun Prize
• 2011 Officer of Arts and Letters
• 2013 Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize
• 2004 Jury Prize

Motto

Private

• Official sitehttp://www.kickthemachine.com
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%94%E3%83%81%E3%83%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%88%E3%83%9D%E3%83%B3%E3%83%BB%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%A9%E3%82%BB%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BF%E3%82%AF%E3%83%B3

Tags

• film director
• film producer
• screenwriter

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.