Lazy Sunday: on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's SleepCinemaHotel

(2018)

I spent the past few days at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which I’ll be writing about in an upcoming dispatch for Artforum. In the meantime, I’m remembering one of my favorite moments at IFFR in years past, the night I spent in the cinematic installation of one of our greatest living auteurs.

APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL ONCE JOKED in an interview that he made films for his audience to fall asleep to. Well, perhaps it was more like a half-joke. The director’s SleepCinemaHotel (2018), one of the highlights of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, puts this idea into practice. Installed in the Zaal Staal of the city’s Postillion Convention Center WTC, the twenty beds on platforms of varying heights could be booked by guests for an overnight stay to take in the 120-hour-long film—featuring footage Apichatpong compiled from the archives of the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam as well as the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, all accompanied by an ambient soundtrack—projected on a large circular screen at the end of the hall.

I wanted to experience SleepCinemaHotel in all its sensorial fullness, so I popped an Ambien and sat in bed writing until I was rolled up in the sonorous fabric the filmmaker wove.