In many ways, Prim Patnasiri had to lose balance to find balance. The Thai artist, actress, and filmmaker—whose Libra sun is literally symbolic of the scales—has been in constant transition since the beginning of her career, fascinated with the concept of redefining oneself on the path towards creative equilibrium. She just turned 28 last September, and this is the first time she genuinely feels connected to herself.
“It’s been more than a decade [since I started working], but I’m just starting to know who I want to be, and what I want to do,” she muses across video call, cosied up in grey sweats from the comfort of her Bangkok riverside flat. It’s the evening before the cover shoot is set to take place in the buzzing capital city. Months before across three days in July, she delved into live performance art at the Bangkok CityCity gallery for director Puangsoi Rose Aksornsawang’s ‘A Draft of Dead Birds’, an experience that explored the interplay between text, storytelling, the filmmaking process and reality within an immersive atmosphere of reading, acting and casting. And just a day before, she was perched alone atop a huge rock somewhere in Koh Tao, watching water flow endlessly by and the clouds drift languidly across the sky.
“I swam, journaled, got into a podcast, and fell asleep,” she recounts. “I was just there with nature and so in the moment with what I was doing.” Her first trip to the small, jungle-topped island was during the pandemic—where she also discovered a love for freediving—and since then, it’s become a place she regularly returns to in search of inner solace amidst the chaos. “The most important thing that I can do for myself whenever I feel cluttered is to be alone and near the ocean. I’m able to reimagine who I am and who I want to be. Picking up [freediving] allowed me to understand and trust myself better by listening to my body and my intuition.”
Patnasiri’s quite big on spirituality and meditation. For her, being open-minded and venturing into the depths of her inner world amongst moments of stillness is what the practice is about.
When it comes to energy, you start attracting things that will guide you through that kind of vision, and make it happen in real life. I think there’s so much beauty in that, and that’s something that I hold on to.
In times of struggle, books, films, and music have also served as an additional source of guidance and comfort. For someone who found her start in the industry at the tender age of nine, these are resources that helped keep her grounded and true to herself. She’s currently reading Don Miguel Ruiz’s 1997 The Four Agreements, a self-help book with principles rooted in the simplicity of traditional Toltec wisdom, and listening to Greek electronic musician Vangelis’ melancholically atmospheric synth-based score from The Blade Runner original soundtrack in 1994—to which “the whole album has been God”.
Through acting stints on kid shows then modelling jobs throughout her teens, she was thrust into a world where she was constantly told what to do and who to be. In 2016, she landed her first major breakthrough on a local comedy sitcom, a moment that was set to kick off her career. Instead, she went on a self-appointed break, disappeared from the screen, and went overseas to pursue a Fine Arts Photography degree at the London College of Communications.
“I felt like I needed to get out,” she shares of this period in her past when she’d been struggling with her mental health. “It was such a tough thing to be lost in that world at such a young age.” There’s a heavy amount of dissociation that comes with the nature of the job—so much of acting and modelling requires giving away parts of yourself, whilst simultaneously navigating a fast-paced, competitive industry that thrives on novelty and is rife with rejection. It can be stressful and isolating for anyone, let alone a young girl still finding her footing in the world.
Moving to London and living alone made her confront herself for the first time. “Entering this Western world of studying, I was making new friends and forced to reinvent myself,” she remembers. “London is a place where you can fail and grow, and fail and grow again. There, I found parts of myself that made me the multidisciplinary person that I am today. It also reminded me of who I actually am, which is a Thai girl behind these two personalities and trying to be that person right now in this time is exciting, you know? There’s a lot that I could explore.”
It was during that period that she gravitated towards philosophy, psychology, and spirituality to better understand her mind. She found guidance in books by the likes of Alan Watts, Rick Rubin, and David Whyte. And while she’d always had an interest in photography and film, studying it also helped her realise she wanted to explore the side of her that could exist behind the camera, alongside the art of storytelling behind these mediums.
“Films have healed me and allowed me to say certain things and explore certain parts of myself, ” she explains on the root of her passions and cites Sofia Coppola, Spike Jones, Where the Wild Things are and Nicole Kidman as continuous inspirations among others. “Acting and directing has been tools that’s nourished me and given me so much experience and life.”
When the pandemic hit, she was forced to return to Thailand. It was a slap in the face, a homecoming to a world that she ran away from. Looking back, “It was a blessing in disguise,” she realises. “I was put back into this space where I had to reflect and once again, look within.”
During lockdown, she worked on her thesis and turned to film as recourse, resulting in her first film and art installation, It is always a changing stream of water before we meet the big blue sea. The project was somewhat self-therapeutic. It brought her down a memory lane of vulnerability and openness, as she explored a renewal of her own identity through juxtapositions of home video footage, family photographs, self-portrait performances and her own recreations. She reconnected with her family and came to terms with her past. The work not only kickstarted her directorial endeavours but also marked the beginning of her journey as a mental health advocate and working with non-profits like SATI, which aim to improve healthcare and education for at-risk and underderserved children across the country. (Most recently, she spent time up in the mountains of Chiang Rai with the organisation photographing children.)
Another milestone birthed from the pandemic was Purple Dahla (2023), her first narrative short that went on to win various accolades for best female director and first-time filmmaker from film festivals across Japan, Korea, and China. Exploring themes of longing and love, the film tells the tale of three Thai twenty-somethings confronting their personal identities and trying to belong in a world put on pause. It also touched upon a folklore of the torch ginger flower (better known to us as the Bunga Kantan) and a story of a Malaysian maiden who wished to be rebirthed as the flower as an act of everlasting devotion to her lover across the Thai border. Moments of intimacy and connection are interspersed with cathartic imagery and metaphors across dreamy, technicolour scenes to highlight the beauty and necessity of change. “It took a year and a half to finish this seventeen-minute film,” she says. “It was my first time directing a film, and I felt lost in the woods. It scarred me for a little bit because it was so hard. Even so, I’m very proud of it and it taught me everything I needed to know about filmmaking.”
Her return to Bangkok also prompted her return to the big screen. In 2022, Patnasiri received an opportunity to play a supporting role in renowned director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s cup-stacking, genre-infused feature Fast and Feel Love, which in turn opened the door to her first main role as tomboyish video rental show owner Bung on Analogue Squad (2023). Directed by another veteran filmmaker Nithiwat Tharatorn, the heartwarming Netflix series explores the concept of found family against the backdrop of a world entering the new millennium. “I was learning as I was going,” she says of being an up-and-coming actress on a set where everyone else was much more experienced. “My director taught me so much and I learned so much about myself and my capabilities in acting. What I loved the most was learning about that character’s philosophy, questioning my connection with it as myself, and translating that through my acting. I think that was the most fun I’ve ever had.”
Being on both sides of the camera has also helped inform her of the different perspectives in filmmaking. She recounts being confused by a technique a director used on her for the editing process but understood why it was useful when she tried it out herself upon directing a music video. “He told me to act out five different emotions in a single take. I was like, why are we doing this? It makes it so hard for me. But then when I went to direct a music video, there was an aha moment where I understood why it could be useful for the editing process.”
As for right now and the future, Patnasiri has her eye on art-house films and breaking it abroad—“I want the stories that I’m in to have meaning. I think that’s important; to evoke a profound story that really moves people.” Whether it be directing or acting, reading or writing, meditating or free-diving, her core belief of what life means lies in the exploration of the self. “It all passes into the human mind and soul. And you can explore so much of that through movie making.”
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Photography: Nelson Chong
Creative Direction & Styling: Ian Loh
Hair: Panithan Summa
Makeup: Chanidapa Kulmaeteesiripak
Producer: Ratchada Tubtimphet
Set Design: Yukon Boonprasart
Photography Assistant: Bernard Chong
Styling Assistant: Lorraine Chai