A collaboration between two artists working in video and installation besides cinematographic composition, Ghost of Asia films children playing at issuing orders to a man on the beach of a Thai island. Partners in crime for several years, Weerasethakul and Lheureux were on the island to shoot a film on the tsunami that swept through the area on Boxing Day, 2004, when their encounter with a group of children evolved into a game: the children direct the cinematographic action. This video installation consists of a double projection on two opposing screens. On one side, the children are shown in quick shots interjected by blackouts. One only gets to hear their instructions which begin in the flavour of Saint Exupéry's Little Prince with requests for drawings and evolve to become more authoritarian orders, in a succession of actions with no specific aim (“drink milk”, “catch a lizard”, etc). The children finally laugh when one tells the man to defecate. On the other screen, the man complies with all their demands in good humour, acting them out with a surprising adroitness that is accentuated by an accelerated montage which adds a touch of the burlesque to the scene. The title Ghost of Asia stems from the belief in ghosts that is entrenched in Thai culture and is a recurring theme in Weerasethakul's films where the living and the dead rub shoulders in an ambiance of geniality. Here the children play at taming a ghost which is in no way terrifying, but which evokes the many bodies that litter the paradisical beaches following the tsunami. At the time in the video, trauma is forgotten and the children regain authority over the actions of errant spirits through make-believe. At the end, the music stops and one hears the sounds of the earlier setting again: waves and conversations, guitars and singing which soothe the atmosphere resonating with children's laughter. Even though both artists did not intervene in the shooting and remained withdrawn from the action – as is often the case in Lheureux's work – the framing and assembly assert a very strong point of view which structures how the scene is perceived. Shot within the same space and time, the choice of using two projections creates an interregnum between the two. While the man is filmed in wide shot and is thus inserted within a festive and touristic atmosphere, the children are framed in medium shots and close-ups, isolated and their faces bathed in a beautiful lighting which intensifies the asperity of their expressions. Their appearances alternated with the succession of black screens create a sense of frustration and a sentiment of the unreal and the uncanny. Seated between the two screens, the spectator has to summon the dynamism of visual perception to keep up with the very rapid tempo of the two screens. Immersed in darkness, captivated by the images and a very rhythmic and repetitive soundtrack, he finds himself in turn manipulated, breathless and plunged into the heart of a childhood vision, a world which is a little mad and where the boundaries between make-believe, reverie and reality become blurred.

Mathilde Roman Translated by Yin Ker