Ashes

machine_elves

one of the most beautiful & poignant shorts i've ever had the pleasure of seeing. some absolutely brilliant touches, like the reprising of the man walking his dog next to the little girl on a bicycle, as well as the gorgeous and colorful staccato-like montages of 35mm film.

Guinness Rider

Rural-urban; politics-poetry; time-timelessness; nationalism-nature; no narrative??? Interesting experimentation with image and sound - not so different from his usual but it gives one moments to reflect, not dominating your conscious. Like looking at paintings without sacrificing integral components of moving images. Why read about it? Just watch it w/ an open mind. Limitations as directions not restrictions.

Matthew_Lucas

Apichatpong Weerasethakul experiments with the new Lomokino 35mm camera in this avant-garde short film commissioned by MUBI. Beautiful and evocative, ASHES is an abstract mood piece made more kinetic that Weerasethakul's usual style by the handcranked Lomokino. A lovely and atmospheric exercise in cinematic style.

Kamran

What’s most interesting is how Weerasethakul crosses content and aesthetic...Taken individually, images from the turbulently framed portion of the film are far more beautiful than images from the ascetically framed portion, despite being rather more unsettling as a visual — cinematic — experience. Read Review: http://aestheticsofthemind.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/ashes/

FilmEdie

Excruciatingly slow-paced and saturated in (to my mind) cloyingly earnest sentimentalism, this film was everything I couldn't relate to in Uncle Boonmee, with the addition of exhausting, headache-inducing visuals and sound.

Zac Weber

Apichatpong asks the audience to meddle in the minutiae of memory without providing any context. As a work of art, Ashes is intriguing. As a cinematic attraction, the short film feels tedious.

Stefan Drees

A challenging experimental work which - in my opinion - looses a little bit of its strengh during the last third.

Derek Tvmala

More than just random frames of images, Ashes has brought those remote and unvisualized emotions into film. It's very rare that a filmmaker taps this region and it's purpose transcends into just telling a story but exploring that thought and brought us to realizations.