Pee chai dai ka

A man in Bangkok is unsettled by the strange noise coming from his vacuum cleaner. The flirtatious repairman who comes around to fix it explains that it is possessed by the ghost of a factory worker who died during its production. Such reincarnations of the dead are commonplace at that factory, and these vacuum cleaners can talk, haunt, care for and even make love to people. PEE CHAI DAI KA weaves together a wealth of conceptual ideas, narratives and motifs, yet does so with total playfulness, its sense of irony in perfect sync with its depth of meaning. Beneath its surreal, absurdist story lies a poignant reflection on Thailand’s national traumas and class tensions. As an erotic queer fantasy, it frames otherness as something that refuses commodification, simplification and the mainstream. Drawing on popular genres ranging from the sitcom and the romcom to sci-fi and urban ghost stories, the film sees love, death, sexuality, memory and dreams as deeply interconnected forces. What unites them is their ephemeral, transgressive and sensual nature—qualities also embedded in the very machinery of cinema, a medium that, like PEE CHAI DAI KA, moves between spaces, times and bodies with effortless fluidity. (Evgeny Gusyatinskiy)

RATCHAPOOM BOONBUNCHACHOKERED: ANINSRI; OR, TIPTOEING ON THE STILL TREMBLING BERLIN WALL (2020, K)