“The Burning Giants”, interview with director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng

During the Venice International Film Festival 2026 we spoke with Phuttiphong Aroonpheng, director of The Burning Giants, presented here in the Orizzonti section of the Festival. A haunting reflection on displacement, memory and the fragile relationship between people and the land they call home, blending environmental conflict with indigenous history, mythology and magical realism, the film explores how erased pasts continue to shape the present. Through ghosts, legends and haunted landscapes, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng turns forgotten histories into a powerful meditation on identity, belonging and resistance.

The interview

During our conversation for FRED Film Radio, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng explored the conflict between environmental conservation and the rights of indigenous communities who have inhabited forest areas for generations. For the director, in The Burning Giants the central tension lies in the radically different ways the same landscape can be perceived: as a protected natural space on one side, and as an ancestral home on the other. Although rooted in Thailand, this conflict has a broader and universal dimension, raising questions about who has the right to define, protect or inhabit a territory.

Mythology and folklore become essential tools through which Aroonpheng reframes this contemporary struggle. Drawing on sources such as the Ramayana and regional legends of ogres persecuted by royal armies, he creates in The Burning Giants a narrative in which displacement, violence and historical memory are filtered through fantasy. Rather than treating myth as an escape from reality, the director uses it to reveal continuities between ancient stories and present-day forms of exclusion and persecution. This approach is closely connected to Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s use of magical realism. Ghosts, lights, haunted places and fragmented memories embody a past that refuses to disappear, even when history attempts to erase it. For him, collective identity is shaped as much by what societies remember as by what they choose to forget. By allowing the fantastical to coexist with the real, The Burning Giants becomes a reflection on suppressed histories and on the enduring presence of those who have been displaced or excluded from official narratives.

Plot