Apichatpong Weerasethakul (born in 1970 in Bangkok) started creating experimental films and video installations while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1997, receiving a master's degree in Fine Arts and Filmmaking. His first full-length film, "Mysterious Object at Noon," premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2000, and his second full-length film, "Blissfully Yours" won the top prize in the 'Un Certain Regard' program at the 55th Cannes Film Festival in 2002.
In 2010, Weerasethakul received the Cannes Festival's highest award – the Palme d'Or prize – for the film "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives". The film "Syndromes and a Century", shown at the 63rd Venice Film Festival, was the first Thai film to be included in the contest program of this festival. In 1999-2008, Apichatpong Weerasethakul co-organized the Bangkok Festival of Experimental Cinema. His films were also shown at numerous art exhibitions, including the 7th Istanbul Biennale (2001), the 10th and 11th Sharjah Biennale (UAE, 2011, 2013), dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, 2012), the 20th Sydney Biennale (2016), the 14th Lyon Biennale (2017), etc. In 2016, the Tate Gallery held a retrospective of the director's films, and in the autumn of 2017 will be open the "Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kao Guimaranis" exhibition at the Amsterdam Film Museum EYE.