Footprints

• Format HD, colour
• Sound 5.1
• Year 2014
• Production Kick the Machine Films

Footprints is Apichatpong’s contribution to an omnibus project exploring analogies between football and everyday life. The project was conceived by the Mexican director Daniel Gruener and first broadcast during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

Shot while preparing Cemetery of Splendour, the film shares that feature’s landscape, its actors and its themes of sleep and dreaming. It is made of unrelated stories set around the lake in Khon Kaen, Apichatpong’s hometown, a place where people unwind, exercise and catch their breath. Over the years the city has filled the park with statues of north-eastern life, men riding water buffaloes and children at traditional games, alongside dinosaurs modelled on fossils found in the region. The park has become a museum of time-machine artefacts.

Drawn to this small world, Apichatpong treats the lake as a pitch. Everyday scenes run side by side in real time, as if they were players racing across a field, and two film crews working together move through them as though they were a single gesture.