When a fortune teller predicts that their elderly grandmother may soon die, nine members of a Thai family set out to visit nine Buddhist temples in a single day. Their pilgrimage becomes a gently funny procession of rituals, squabbles and competing obligations, revealing the rhythms of family life and contemporary Thailand.

2026
9 Temples to Heaven
9 Temples to Heaven
When a fortune teller predicts that their elderly grandmother may soon die, nine members of a Thai family set out to visit nine Buddhist temples in a single day, hoping to improve her karma. What follows is a pilgrimage of prayers and offerings, but also squabbles, jokes, practical frustrations and competing ideas about what family members owe one another. Moving into fiction, documentarian Sompot Chidgasornpongse retains his gift for unobtrusive but incisive observation. His patient compositions give family behaviour the same attention as temples and ritual, allowing the sacred and everyday to coexist without ceremony. Affectionate and gently funny, 9 Temples to Heaven finds the textures of contemporary Thailand in the details of one family trying, in their various ways, to do right by each other.
