Pop Aye
Ecologies • 1h 41m
Kirsten Tan • 2016 • Thailand-Singapore • A retired architect journeys home with an elephant in tow.
Kirsten Tan's debut posits an unlikely friendship as a man and an elephant journey to Thailand's Isan province.
Thana is a middle-aged architect living in Bangkok. While professionally successful, he is unhappy with his life. After encountering an elephant one night while wandering the city, Thana decides to embark toward Isan, his childhood home in Thailand's idyllic north. He brings Pop Aye, the elephant, with him on a journey that intersects with various characters and culminates in a form of companionship both deep and unexpected.
Pop Aye premiered at Sundance, where it won the Screenwriting Award for World Cinema - Dramatic, and Rotterdam, where it won the Big Screen Award.
Essay: Pop Aye: A Symphony of Subdued Emotions, and a Cry for the Right to the City
Up Next in Ecologies
-
Seeds of Time
Sandy McLeod • USA • 2015 • Building seed banks that will stand the test of time.
Agriculturist Cary Fowler, director of Global Crop Diversity Trust and co-founder of Norway's Svalbard Global Seed Vault, has spe...
-
The Land of Azaba
Greta Schiller • USA • 2020 • A radical experiment of ecological restoration.
The Campanarios de Azaba Nature Reserve in Spain is one of the largest remaining tracts of wild nature in western Europe. Over t...
-
The Messenger
Su Rynard • Canada, France, Costa Rica, Germany, Netherlands, Turkey, United States • 2015
An encompassing vision of the lives of songbirds and their integral role in wider ecosystems.
For thousands of years, songbirds...
