PRESS
"A fascinating corrective to any nationalistic idea of monoculture”
- Screen Daily
“The most powerful moments of the film come in the nanny’s journey into the forest. The cramped, shadowy interiors of the city give way to hazy, dreamlike expanses of forest, where she encounters abandoned Indigenous homes. In one particularly affecting scene, she sings in an empty house, calling for a spirit to “return to the forest”. Her song echoes the dance and song performed earlier by her husband while he is chained to a bed, both expressing a painful yearning for home. Enhanced by a minimalist, deeply atmospheric sound design, these dual laments become a powerful elegy for the displaced Karen people.”- Close-Up Culture
“In Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s career to date, strange things have happened in the jungle, although for a distinct purpose. Those acres of tropical vegetation are imagined as a deeply political space as well as one where fantastical phenomena arise, which always induce a dark awe, with no tonal preciousness or whimsy to be found. In his breakthrough, Manta Ray, the 2018 Venice Orizzonti winner, we saw an armed soldier stalking the terrain, his uniform completely wrapped in sparkling Christmas lights. He returns to the section this year with The Burning Giants, whose opening scene sees a mysterious plume of smoke rising from a man-made space beneath the trees; whilst that initial description evokes a lair from a Sean Connery James Bond film, what Aroonpheng devises, as we discover later on, is even more imaginative and uncanny.”
- Cineuropa
- Screen Daily
“The most powerful moments of the film come in the nanny’s journey into the forest. The cramped, shadowy interiors of the city give way to hazy, dreamlike expanses of forest, where she encounters abandoned Indigenous homes. In one particularly affecting scene, she sings in an empty house, calling for a spirit to “return to the forest”. Her song echoes the dance and song performed earlier by her husband while he is chained to a bed, both expressing a painful yearning for home. Enhanced by a minimalist, deeply atmospheric sound design, these dual laments become a powerful elegy for the displaced Karen people.”- Close-Up Culture
“In Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s career to date, strange things have happened in the jungle, although for a distinct purpose. Those acres of tropical vegetation are imagined as a deeply political space as well as one where fantastical phenomena arise, which always induce a dark awe, with no tonal preciousness or whimsy to be found. In his breakthrough, Manta Ray, the 2018 Venice Orizzonti winner, we saw an armed soldier stalking the terrain, his uniform completely wrapped in sparkling Christmas lights. He returns to the section this year with The Burning Giants, whose opening scene sees a mysterious plume of smoke rising from a man-made space beneath the trees; whilst that initial description evokes a lair from a Sean Connery James Bond film, what Aroonpheng devises, as we discover later on, is even more imaginative and uncanny.”
- Cineuropa
SALES AGENT