Sompot “Boat” Chidgasornpongse

Director, At A Time Pictures

Industry : The Arts

A pilgrimage may begin with faith, but in Sompot “Boat” Chidgasornpongse’s cinema it becomes a way of examining family, belief and the spaces people share. His feature debut, 9 Temples to Heaven (2026), was the only Thai feature selected for the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, premiering in Directors’ Fortnight and competing for the Caméra d’Or. The film was recently selected as Thailand’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards.

The film follows a family attempting to visit nine Buddhist temples in a single day. Within that compressed journey, generational differences and private tensions are brought into close proximity, allowing ritual to become a frame for the complicated realities of contemporary family life.

Boat’s visual sensibility has roots in architecture, which he studied at Chulalongkorn University before completing an MFA in Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts. His earlier documentary, Railway Sleepers (2016), travelled from Busan to the Berlinale and numerous other international festivals, establishing his patient attention to place, duration and everyday rhythms.

He has also worked extensively as an assistant director to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, contributing to Tropical Malady (2004), Syndromes and a Century (2006), Cemetery of Splendour (2015) and Memoria (2021). That experience is evident without defining him. With 9 Temples to Heaven, Boat brings his observational instincts decisively into fiction, finding within one family’s pilgrimage a resonant encounter between inherited tradition and present-day life – and carrying Thai cinema onto one of the world’s most closely watched stages.