Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, Local Sensations opens a loose, playful dialogue with Chatri Prakitnonthakan's essay, How to Design a Modern Monument That Won't Become a Shrine. Rather than illustrating the text, the film generates pluralities -- unraveling the dichotomy of object and subject -- and gestures toward a kind of topological politics.

Though it circles around ideas of monuments, monumentality, and sanctification in Thai society, no statues or literal monuments ever appear. Instead, the film drifts through an arborist's walking tour, a glassblowing workshop, a drawing game among architecture students, a multi-instrument improviser, a recreation center with its non-human inhabitants, and a snow town in a theme park.

These fragments, only obliquely connected, are woven into an evolving, gently destabilizing field of sensation. Together, they form an ecological and metaphysical nexus -- an invitation to reconsider what "locality" and "monumentality" might mean, and how close they are to us.

Director/editor/writer:Tulapop Saenjaroen

Production format: 16mm

Screenings and Exhibitions:
Silpa Bhirasri Creativity Grants 24 exhibition, Art Centre, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
MoMA Doc Fortnight 2026, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
In Competition, NEW:VISION AWARD, CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, Denmark
In Competition, Cinéma du réel, Paris, France
Avant-Garde Now: Wayfinding, M+ Museum, Hong Kong
39th European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück, Germany
In Competition, San Diego Underground Film Festival

Awards:
24th SILPA BHIRASRI CREATIVITY GRANTS
Special Mention NEW:VISION, CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, Denmark
(Prix du Court Métrage) Short Film Award, Cinéma du réel, Paris, France