As a story about storytelling, MANGOSTEEN is my personal journey to ask myself: what does it mean to write fiction? And what have stories done or how have they functioned in our understanding of life?
Shot with dated tech Digital8, MANGOSTEEN is set in Rayong, a province on the east coast of the gulf of Thailand, where there are plenty of mangosteen plantations, occasionally oil spill incidents in the ocean, and the statue of a fictional ogress from the classical Thai epic poem’s is erected. The film was shot with a half-finished script. The other half was improvised and was written after the images had been produced.
Mainly presented in narrative form, the work intends to play with the power of writing, its narratology, stories on the peripheries, self-doubt in one’s subjectivity, and the paradoxes intertwining between being desubjectivated and the possibility of self-desubjectivation.
I am interested in the potential of fiction that can broaden one’s horizon in understanding the world.
For me, the film is an attempt to portray the time to reflect, interrogate, and destabilize one’s preconceived perceptibility towards one’s own existence in relation to other existences in this infectiously and chronically anxious, futureless time—the time in which merely continuous metamorphosis is evidently inadequate. I am interested in the potential of fiction that can broaden one’s horizon in understanding the world—not through coercing established rationality into the story to replicate the world as it is, or to reproduce a kind of indoctrination, but through the potentialities of fictive matters that could create alternatives and energies—other possible ways to rethink and re-experience—an imaginability to change.
Tulapop Saenjaroen
