Father! You Left Me Dreaming in a Colonizer’s Tongue is a multi-channel one hour long slow film and installation which meditates on Thailand as both the artist’s point of origin and a patriarchal fatherland—an entity shaped by structures of violence that reproduce cycles of neglect and self-annihilation. Foregrounding an autobiographical, poetic coming-of-age reflection on the artist’s estrangement from her homeland, the film explores Thailand as a paternal figure, where the government’s abandonment of its citizens through failing infrastructure and extractive priorities reverberates through material realities and intimate lives.

The film intersperses Jeanne Dielman-esque domestic sequences of the protagonist’s quiet existence in the States with surreal scenes of her childhood self digging endlessly and real recordings of her mother’s voice on a phone call. The film triangulates the fatherland, the precarious citizen, and the motherland, drawing parallels between national violence and familial history. Throughout the film, the figure of an abusive father and a narrating mother anchors the protagonist’s search for origin, memory, and rupture, situating the family as a microcosm of the nation’s patriarchal logic. The mother’s voice provides context to the protagonist’s point of origin, while the father emerges as a figure of both authority and abandonment.