MAM Screen 024: Jakrawal Nilthamrong

Preview: written before the show opened

In Rhizome the land is gone. A man drifts on a makeshift raft over a flooded world, and staying alive now means adapting to the micro-organisms spreading through it. A 16-minute festival cut of the film puts a sick woman and a cow on the raft with him, until strangers kill the cow.

Nilthamrong, a Bangkok filmmaker and winner of Rotterdam's Hivos Tiger Award, often shoots on expired film stock with 1960s-style effects made from organic materials, so the decay his films are about shows in the picture itself. The 29-minute Rhizome leads a programme of about 39 minutes, with two shorter films, Agent of Decay (2025) and Intransit (2013). Fifty-three floors above Roppongi is the driest seat in Tokyo for a film about a world under water.

You can only catch it after dark: screenings run 18:00 to 22:00, never on Tuesdays or on 27 November. Entry is the Mariko Mori: All That Shines ticket, ¥2,800 on weekdays and ¥3,000 at weekends.