June
CHANTHILA PHAOPHANIT is a London based artist filmmaker. Her films balance delicately on the border of poetry and documentary and are unafraid of sitting outside of established categories. Through her work she often explores oral histories, memory, myth and folklore. Chanthila holds a BA in Fine Art, graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. Since then she has been working in the film industry as a Camera Assistant and Director of Photography and maintains a practice as a moving image artist and director.
We spoke to Chanthila about her work and the conversation touched on themes of memory and ghosts in her films, film as myth-making, and navigating the silences and in-between spaces within an evolving film practice. Check the video above to watch the full conversation!
In Red Jeep Chanthila meditates on her father and ponders on a childhood myth. The story of the ‘flat head’ presents two mistruths and ends with a message of acceptance. We are placed on the outside looking in on a story that reveals Laos' complex social and political history..
Still House is a family ghost story retold. We peer into a conversation suspended in time as we journey through a tunnel - a space between and a space of potential.
We Have Only What We Remember is a sketch; a representation of Chanthila's ongoing exploration into the theme of memory and the materiality of the image. Here she explores the image as object and expresses our fleeting relationship to memory. The idea of trying to grasp a moment that is always escaping us and being left with just the remnants.