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 with her homeland, the film explores Thailand as a paternal figure, where the government’s abandonment of its citizens through failing infrastructure, extractive priorities, and the privileging of profit over collective survival and the sustainability of the land born out of sociopolitical entanglements that goes beyond the protagonist’s own unit of knowing and understanding but impacts her nonetheless.

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.

The film fragmented storytelling, surreal aesthetics and poetic timescales mirrors the protagonist’s haunted relationship with her homeland, highlighting the visible and invisible sociopolitical forces that propel her displacement and shape her life of precarity in the United States. Though physically present within the states, her existence remains provisional—structured by temporary status, bureaucratic uncertainty, and the constant possibility of removal. In this suspended condition, the film asks: what does it mean to dream in a colonizer’s tongue when one’s fatherland has enacted betrayal? English emerges as both instrument of survival and language of estrangement. The fatherland persists as both origin and site of annihilation—producing subjects who must leave in order to live, yet remain haunted by the conditions that forced their departure.