This digital featurette, not quite a companion piece to Tropical Malady but certainly related to it, shows Joe operating at the height of his formalist powers. One of the things I’ve valued about Weerasethakul’s work since Mysterious Object at Noon is his commitment to exploring the traditions of avant-garde cinema while taking those idioms into uncharted territory. While some works by Joe have displayed an interest in bending the strategies of Andy Warhol and Bruce Baillie to the needs of Thai folklore and narrative gamesmanship, Worldly Desires takes a more structural approach. However this piece bears little resemblance to structural film as we usually think of it; if there are specific touchstones for Worldly Desires in film history, they would be those “other” structuralists, so wonky and off the beaten track as to thwart easy categorization. Like Morgan Fisher’s early film projects, Worldly Desires is a documentation of the filmmaking process. Within a single expansive jungle location, portions of a Thai soap opera are being filmed by day, and a music video is being made by night.We watch at a significant remove, behind the camera and lighting crews. Multiple views display random bits of business on the periphery, like the craft services table or a playback monitor. However, the stringent day / night rhythmic structure breaks down in the end, the night song (about a woman wondering if she’ll be as lucky in love as her mom was — an Electra Complex with a disco beat) eventually bleeding into the daytime shoot. But more significantly, the relatively austere TV production, whose melodramatic dialogue is mostly heard in disconnected snippets, is contrapuntally offset by the swelling musical numbers. They break up the video, with the unexpected jolt of pure pleasure. Although these sequences recall the musical interludes in certain of Tsai Ming-liang’s films, they’re shot in the mode of early Hou Hsiao-hsien, dancing girls reduced to tiny figures in a wide expanse, itself engulfed within an intractable master-shot. The rigor / comedy handoff recalls aspects of Owen Land’s work, but perhaps more importantly, Joe’s visual and conceptual approach displays a sensitivity to the unique qualities of the jungle landscape, a willingness to let the “location” become the subject of the piece. Worldly Desires is a landscape film, one that brings that most mythologically burdened aspect of Tropical Malady — its deep, dark thicket of the soul — and allows it to grow wild and overtake the image.

Ekusute begins in bloody, unsettling fashion with the discovery of the body of a young girl, whose organs have been harvested and hair shaven to make extensions. The corpse ends up in the hands of morgue watchman and hair fetishist Yamazaki (Osugi Ren), who excitedly discovers that the girl's hair is still growing. He uses her long and silky hair to make extensions, which he sells to customers who invariably turn up dead, strangled by their own hair. When Yamazaki meets flighty aspiring hairstylist Yuko (Kuriyama Chiaki), he immediately becomes mesmerized by her beautiful hair, and presents her with a gift of hair extensions.

Petite but determined Yu Hing is working as a museum research assistant when a Japanese man, Tao, inquires about a piece of Chinese calligraphy entitled "The Cold Food Observance". Yu Ching sees an opportunity here both for romance and for the healing of her friendship with an emotionally repressed pal, Dong Heng, as the artwork is the center point of a book Dong is writing. However, Dong reacts with jealousy.

A wealthy married couple decide to ignore strict laws banning zombies in private homes and takes in a female zombie to groom as their housekeeper. When the zombie arrives, they also receive a note warning against feeding her any type of meat and also a loaded handgun. Meanwhile, the scarred zombie named Sara (Ayaka Komatsu) endures horrors, while longing for something from her past.

Science Madman (An Hu) has privately developed a highly developed humanoid robot with sympathetic nerves to satisfy his own desires. Unexpectedly, the robot developed its autonomous consciousness. It exchanged the skin of the beautiful woman Su Xin (Hayden Kuo) through "Black Technology" and lurked beside Su Xin's boyfriend Wang Sheng (Duan Bowen). On the other side, the bizarre serial murder case has attracted the attention of police officer Li Dongbin (played by Liu Yiwei), and the danger is quietly brewing. "Mechanically Painted Skin" is a science fiction love film directed by Zhang Nan, starring Guo Biting and Duan Bowen, starring Liu Yiwei, Mimi, Ma Yujie, Nie Mei, and starring An Hu. The film is based on the chapter of "Painted Skin" in the classic Chinese classic "Liao Zhai". It describes a scientific madman who developed a humanoid AI with sympathetic nerves. When AI germinates its autonomous consciousness, it hunts the beautiful women for skin removal. The story that took their place and lurked around their boyfriend.

Arjun and Anu are fraternal twins who manage to run a scam in the US from India via a call center. With police officer Kumar hot on their heels, will they manage to escape the system?

An environmental analyst is asked by the police to determine if two deaths by hydrogen sulfide poisoning are an accident - or a murder. But when he meets a young woman at both sites, a scientific mystery begins.

Following the death of the second Tokugawa shogun, it is revealed that he was poisoned by retainers of his son Iemitsu in hopes of gaining him the shogunate despite the stammer and birthmark which undermine his respect. Iemitsu and his brother Tadanaga become bitter rivals for the shogunate, and the land is split into factions, eventually erupting into warfare. Iemitsu's mentor, his fencing instructor Yagyu, is fixated upon securing Iemitsu the shogunate and ends up betraying everyone, even his own family, in pursuit of the goal.