Teuga
Seedlings
Tatsuki Shirai / Thailand, United Kingdom / 2020 / 46 min / Colour
Italian premiere
Doi Inthanon is the highest peak in Thailand's mountains: its profile embraces a wide valley in which there is a village of Karen peasants, who walk the ridges and hills below every day to work the land and plant rice. Their lives are marked by the rhythms of the seasons, the rains and their work in the fields, which every day marks the profile of the places they inhabit. Tatsuki Shirai follows their daily gestures, framing a landscape that is constantly changing thanks to tireless, centuries-old human labour. But something is changing in that remote village too. Some farmers are starting to rent out their homes to tourists passing through, curious to climb the mountain.
Tatsuki Shirai
Tatsuki Shirai is a Japanese filmmaker and photographer, born in Chiba. He studied Cultural Anthropology at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and did two years of field research in Sikkim in the Eastern Himalayas, India. He lived in Thailand for two years, working as a photographer and in 2019 completed an MA in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Teuga (2020) is his debut short film, presented at Vision du Reel - Festival international de cinéma Nyon.
Credits
Screenplay Tatsuki ShiraiCinematography Tatsuki ShiraiEditing Tatsuki ShiraiMain cast Asak, Kanchana, PoneuteuProduction company Tatsuki Shirai