Big Ears Listen With Feet + discussion

Screening of the movie Big Ears Listen With Feet and the following discussion in English.

Big Ears Listen With Feet / la Bêka, Louise Lemoine / Thailand 2022 / DCP / 93 min. – Artist-filmmakers Bêka & Lemoine take us to Bangkok on a one day hectic journey through the chaotic concrete jungle of the South-Asian megacity. Led by the moving personal story of Boonserm Premthada, one of today's most important Thai architects, the film unfolds through a free wander, punctuated by stunning encounters, events and places, which have contributed to shape Premthada's unique identity and sensibility. Deaf from birth, the architect evokes how his disability led him to develop an alternative way of listening using his whole body as a resonance chamber of sound vibrations. Despite their large ears, elephants also perceive sound mostly through their feet.

Learning from elephants, Boonserm has developed an architecture of the senses where sound vibrations become the voice of space. Walking through the dark streets of the slum where he grew up, flying to remote rural communities living in symbiosis with elephants, and observing old ladies’ devotion towards the buddhist monks of their village, the film reveals, through impressive sequences, the architect’s active commitment to work with people for whom architecture can have a strong social impact. When a road movie merges with a film diary, here comes the one of a kind style of Bêka & Lemoine’s performative cinema.