Thai Golden Palm winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker and visual artist. Just like most of his enigmatic oeuvre, this short video work is lyrical and dreamlike. Emerald places two characters from the 1906 Buddhist novel The Pilgrim Kamanita against the backdrop of the Morakot, a Bangkok hotel in the early 1980s, a time of rapid economic development and the arrival of Cambodian refugees in Thailand.

Apichatpong worked with his three regular actors, who spoke of their dreams, bad moments, and love poems, to infuse the hotel with new memories. Emerald seeks to bring back anecdotes and people lost to geopolitical events, underscoring the transience of the physical world and the importance of personal connections.