Common Cold

Social inequality, environmentally destructive extractivism and the violent reverberations of colonial nation-building are the constituent ingredients of dictatorial power regimes. They manifest from national boundaries established during the colonial era – an externally imposed structure that traumatized land, body, mind and spirit in numerous places. The selected films, lifted from both archives and contemporary sources, focus on Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia against the backdrop of the Cold War and its aftermath. In a reparative gesture, the film selection of Common Cold – un.thai.tled Film Festival 2021 is not organized along such violent and confining categories, but follows traces and entanglements that transcend national and geographic boundaries to raise questions regarding the bearing of responsibility for colonial damage in the relationship between Europe and Southeast Asia. ​​As such, not only films from the region will be shown but ones produced in Europe which offer diverse, diasporic perspectives.

un.thai.tled brings together artists and creatives from Thailand and those with a Thai diasporic background. The collective curates cinema and cultural events in which stereotypes concerning Thailand and Southeast Asia are broken. un.thai.tled stands for resistance against invisibility but also against labels and external classifications.

Funded by Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Stiftung Nord-Süd Brücken and Goethe Institut Thailand

Sarnt Utamachote (ษาณฑ์อุตมโชติ) is a Southeast Asian nonbinary filmmaker and curator based in Berlin. They are a co-founder of the artist collective un.thai.tled and curated film events and exhibitions regarding postcolonial histories, Southeast Asian diaspora and activism. Currently they work as a selection committee member for Xposed Queer Film Festival Berlin and Short Film Festival Hamburg.

Rosalia Namsai Engchuan is an artist, filmmaker and anthropologist who is interested in ecology of knowledge, grass-root artist-led activism in Southeast Asia and issues of Thai/Asian diaspora in Germany.