Mekong Hotel
It is one thing for a film to blur the line between documentary and narrative fiction, and quite another to understand them as pieces of the same whole. I am tempted to list out taxonomies of difference, but in doing so I would have taken nothing home with me from my time at the Mekong Hotel. <PERSON>'s quiet, meditative films are filled with violence and suffering, an anguish that lines the borders of every moment of sensory experience. It is evoked through memories and is only visualized here as monster movie gore; a rehearsal of a depiction of ghosts, a narrative fiction that is also a documentary reality of human perception. 306
The human violence, the trauma, is just out of frame, spatially and temporally. The militarized violence of the past told in story, the steadily rising river and the violence of flooding (my mind wanders to that sequence in <PERSON>'s Hereafter). I watched this film with my snoozing cat and the ghost of <PERSON>, who's love of sleepy films came in and out of my conscious sensory observation as I dozed off a little in the middle, comforted by the continued duration of this film playing on my television. I felt it watching me like a parent watches a sleeping baby, despite the reality that it's a conjured image indifferent to my existence. What is this film asking of me? As the sounds + images steadily wash over me like the Mekong river that anchors every shot my mind turns to <PERSON> and the reminder that paradoxes do not exist as challenges for humans to reconcile, but rather to learn how to live with. 61