Teuga

Director: Tatsuki Shirai

UK/Thailand, 2020

46′

Synopsis

A Karen village in Thailand’s highest mountain (Doi Inthanon), home to both wildlife and indigenous peoples, has traditionally coexisted with its natural landscape through rice cultivation. However, for Asak’s young family, a recent interest in domestic tourism on the mountain has created new avenues of metamorphosis for village life. TEUGA, titled from a Karen word that means seedlings, explores the relationship between people and the landscape as a lived experience. Consisting of ever-changing non-human and human beings, landscapes always remain. They gather and recall memories through generations, gaze at and touch us, and embody our engagement with the world. In other words, we perpetually live landscapes that will evolve with and beyond us. This film will not only evoke in audiences a sense of the Karen people’s temporal and spatial lifeworld, but also allow self reflection of the landscapes that have embraced us, that we live today, and that we will nurture into the future.

About Director

Tatsuki Shirai is a Japanese filmmaker/photographer and has an MA in visual anthropology from the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester in the UK. Coming from anthropology and photography backgrounds, he previously conducted long-term fieldwork in Sikkim (India) and Chiang Mai (Thailand). His current interests center around the lived experience and aesthetics of everyday life and landscape as well as the potential creative intersection of art and anthropology. TEUGA, his directorial debut, is based on his final project developed subsequent to four short films during his masters.

Crew

Camera: Tatsuki Shirai

Editing: Tatsuki Shirai

Sound: Tatsuki Shirai

Producer: Tatsuki Shirai

Trailer