Festivals and awards Mysterious Object at Noon premiered in January 2000 at the
International Film Festival Rotterdam, having received support from the Hubert Bals Fund in 1998. It had its North American premiere at the
Vancouver International Film Festival, where it won a special citation Dragons and Tigers Award. It won the Grand Prize (Woosuk Award) at the
Jeonju International Film Festival, second prize and the
NETPAC Special Mention Prize at the
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. It was screened at many other film festivals, including
London,
Singapore and
Hong Kong.
Critical reception Because its experimental nature falls outside the mainstream of
Thai cinema,
Mysterious Object at Noon received little attention in the director's native country. However, through film festival screenings overseas, the film gained positive notice from film critics. "Mr. Weerasethakul's film is like a piece of chamber music slowly, deftly expanding into a full symphonic movement; to watch it is to enter a
fugue state that has the music and rhythms of another culture. It's really a movie that requires listening, reminding us that the medium did become talking pictures at one point," said
Elvis Mitchell in
The New York Times.
Preservation Mysterious Object at Noon has been restored by the Austrian Film Museum and The Film Foundation from the best surviving elements and released on DVD in 2015. and it was released in 2017 on DVD and Blu-ray by
The Criterion Collection as part of the
Scorsese's World Cinema Project Series No. 2 along with
Lino Brocka's
Insiang. ==References==