Perth has broken off contact with Poon. What’s left are images showing the two men’s sex life. Perth was Poon’s twenty years younger cinematographer. His images, as impressive as they are intimate, contain the beginning and end of a relationship which Thunska Pansittivorakul confronts again for “Avalon”. A painful look back that raises existential questions and is immediately affecting.

“In Thailand, sex is considered shameful, sinful, disgusting, and not to be spoken of in public. Sex is a personal and private mystery, revealed only to those who engage in it together”, Thunska Pansittivorakul comments his film in which he liberally subverts precisely this taboo. It shows not only two men who meet and unite in explicit poses – Adolf Hitler and King Rama VII, too, show up at a Berlin airport, the tender serenade of a Thai prince (said to be an expression of his unrequited love for a foreign princess) enters into a dialogue with the exuberant electronic compositions of the Thai musician Space360. And time and again the planes denoting distance and leave-taking fly by on the horizon. “You used to like my cock more. Don’t you remember?”

A gaudily coloured twisty slide takes us into emotional shallows. A squeaky voice complains about its inadequacies. It belongs to an animated figure which serves as a catch bowl for a soul that’s not doing well. Its creator has pieced it together, but something holistic does not pop out of the demiurgic mush. Tulapop Saenjaroen uncovers the beginnings of Thai animation and takes a critical look at the future promise of media placebos.