Jessada Chan-yaem
มนุสฺโสสิ (How Rivers Become Clouds), 2026

มนุสฺโสสิ (How Rivers Become Clouds) emerges from Jessada Chan-yaem’s ongoing engagement with family memory, gender, Buddhist ritual, and the mythology of the Naga. At the centre of the work is the Thai Buddhist tradition in which the ordination of a male descendant can generate merit for his parents and grandparents. The work begins from an intimate impossibility: after transitioning, the filmmaker can no longer occupy the social and religious position of the grandson who could traditionally enter the monkhood and make merit for their grandmother. Rather than attempting to resolve this contradiction, the film uses it as a point of departure to imagine another ritual. By bringing together Super 16mm images, documentary material, personal memory, Buddhist mythology, and constructed ritual, the film asks whether cinema itself might become a space in which a body excluded from one ceremony can invent another. In this sense, the film does not simply document a ritual. The making and projection of the film become part of the ritual itself—a gesture toward the filmmaker’s grandmother, and an attempt to imagine transformation beyond the boundaries imposed upon gender, body, and religious belonging.

Text by the artist.