In April the Following Year, There Was a Fire   TG-2012 

A poetic title, almost a film description, that demands some close reading. Just like the film, which - as a visual poem - doesn’t immediately divulge its meaning. A young filmmaker looks back at his childhood in the sometimes boring, sometimes beautiful countryside.

Nuhm is a foreman in the building industry in Bangkok who has to look for other work. On the eve of the Thai New Year, he returns to his birthplace in the north-east of Thailand (where director Wichanon Somumjarn also grew up). After the wedding of a school friend, Nuhm goes to see his father, but their reunion is difficult. Meeting a young woman he was once in love with brings out other feelings. They talk about Albert Camus' rules for a happy life and Nuhm admits that he would most love to make films. Meanwhile, on the radio we hear news reports about riots in other parts of the country.
The film takes an unexpected turn when, in a documentary fragment, the director's father and older brother appear on screen. Then it becomes apparent that much of what we’ve seen is autobiographical - the title refers to an event that took place when Somumjarn was six months old. Fiction, reality, memories and dreamlike images become increasingly intertwined.
This first full-length feature film by former architecture student Somumjarn leans primarily on moods and feelings. A lot remains unsaid. Beauty can be inside issues, such as caring for a horse, the landscape or a karaoke song about diverging life paths. It’s also a meditation. And, as the director says: 'This is the story of my land.'

Programmer Note by Gertjan Zuilhof:

Last year we screened the short film All That Remains by Wichanon Somumjarn. In the information he supplied with the film, he wrote that he was working on his first full-length feature and that this short film was in fact a fragment from the coming film.
In the early autumn of last year, when I was in Bangkok as a guest of Wichanon’s producer Anocha Suwichakornpong (she won a Tiger Award in 2010), Wichanon’s 19-year-old editor Machima Ungsriwong showed me the rough version of the film. At that time, the title of the film was still Like Raining at the End of April and in my head, the film still has that title.
I waited for the moment that the short film would appear as a scene. The story - crucial to the film, I thought - about the filmmaker's brother who was once stung most unpleasantly by a jellyfish, which left him with a scar. His brother repeatedly told this story and it had an important place in his memories. And this film is about that kind of memories. Of the filmmaker, but also of his brother and maybe also of his father. The short film didn’t come. It turned out that they had removed the fragment from the film, just before my arrival. That’s the kind of film it is: composed of fragments that can swap places, with a title that can change too.