A simple story about the hesitant overtures between a bitter invalid and his new nurse is the prelude to a hallucinogenic meditation about our place in the universe. As impressive and mysterious as life itself.

This first full-length feature by the Thai film maker Anocha Suwichakornpong is as mysterious as life itself. A bitter young man who is paralysed from the waist down after an accident has been appointed a new nurse. Their relationship is cool, to put it mildly, and his authoritarian father, who seldom shows his face, also is not a model of warmth and understanding. In long, neutral scenes separated by hard cuts, the contours emerge of a restrained psychological drama in which the young man's cynicism slowly makes way for a renewed, cautious attempt to explore life.
Then the film unexpectedly drops all its reserves and explodes in a hallucinogenic ode to the universe that, like people, has to go through a cycle of birth and death. The editing frees itself from the fixed course of time. 'Can you live in an eternal present, without past and future?' is the question that is asked somewhere halfway through. Behind the narration about the paralysed man and his nurse lies the real essence: a meditation about our place in the cosmos - insignificant, yet grand. It all comes together in that long, majestic shot of a birth. Mundane History received support in the form of a contribution by the Hubert Bals Fund.

____________________________________

Subtitles: English, Dutch

____________________________________


DVDrip

Format                           : AVI
File size                        : 929 MiB
Duration                         : 1h 18mn
Overall bit rate                 : 1 665 Kbps

Video
ID                               : 0
Format                           : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile                   : Simple@L1
Format settings, BVOP            : No
Format settings, QPel            : No
Format settings, GMC             : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix          : Default (H.263)
Codec ID                         : DX50
Codec ID/Hint                    : DivX 5
Duration                         : 1h 18mn
Bit rate                         : 1 523 Kbps
Width                            : 720 pixels
Height                           : 416 pixels
Display aspect ratio             : 16:9
Frame rate                       : 29.970 fps
Color space                      : YUV
Chroma subsampling               : 4:2:0
Bit depth                        : 8 bits
Scan type                        : Progressive
Compression mode                 : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)               : 0.170
Stream size                      : 850 MiB (91%)

Audio
ID                               : 1
Format                           : MPEG Audio
Format version                   : Version 1
Format profile                   : Layer 3
Codec ID                         : 55
Codec ID/Hint                    : MP3
Duration                         : 1h 18mn
Bit rate mode                    : Constant
Bit rate                         : 128 Kbps
Channel(s)                       : 2 channels
Sampling rate                    : 48.0 KHz
Compression mode                 : Lossy
Stream size                      : 71.4 MiB (8%)
Alignment                        : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration             : 24 ms (0.72 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration     : 24 ms
Writing library                  : LAME3.98.2