Realm of the Six Senses

Film festivals come in all themes and sizes and give prizes from Golden Bears to Audience Awards – but if there were an award for the world's most exclusive, it would surely go to Film on the Rocks, inaugurated and curated by Tilda Swinton and Palme d'Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul last week at the blissful Six Senses resort on Koh Yao Noi, a tiny island off Phuket in Thailand. I'm not really sure what it was I just attended in the line of journalistic duty – "Castaways," Swinton called the assembled guests. "Not quite a festival but a mind orgy," preferred Apichatpong (a national hero following his 2010 win at Cannes with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives). A diverse selection of guests included British director Joanna Hogg (if she were looking for new material, after Unrelated and Archipelago, to skewer certain middle-class types on their holidays, she was in the right spot), Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang, indie darling Chloë Sevigny (who was adorned with a smattering of pale, skinny boys who would often be heard uttering what for me became the festival's catchphrase: "I'm just hanging out with Chloe" – should be printed on T-shirts, that one), Dazed founder Jefferson Hack, film-maker Gregg Araki, New York MoMa curator Josh Siegel and Thailand's Rirkrit Tiravanija. Swinton presided regally, magnificently, and one couldn't help recall her role in Danny Boyle's film of The Beach. However, here, she coaxed together a programme of arty shorts and rarities, all screened in the most beautiful locations. "Taking cinema back to its roots," she told me, just as she had done when she and Mark Cousins pulled a mobile cinema in a bus around Scottish towns.

Empire state of mind

Part of the festival's ethos was to show films in "primordial" locations, which turned out to be as spectacular as it was folly. It began, for example, with a "conceptual screening", which we all attended deep in the island forest by a 300ft high tree. Musician Arto Lindsay had recorded jungle sounds to play out, and Rirkrit T brought a projector and reels in a huge trunk, which lay on the forest floor, pointed toward a makeshift screen but never shown. "What film's in the box?" I asked innocently. It was the full 10 reels of Andy Warhol's eight-hour rarity Empire, flown in from New York and boated out to this jungle, just for, well, the hell of it.

Alice meets Coltrane

Before the festival, Swinton had urged guests to share creative inspirations and bring with them a "message in a bottle". My choice was – unbeknown to me until I got there – accorded a centrepiece slot. The BFI Archive had lent me a digitally restored copy of Cecil Hepworth's 1903 Alice in Wonderland , which screened in an island lagoon, on a raft designed by architect Ole Scheeren. I gave a brief introduction to the work but I was unprepared for how ethereal and wondrous it would look. It helped that, following a monsoon that threatened to nix the event that afternoon, I decided to change the restoration's score (no offence to composer Wendy Hiscocks, whose "Jill in the Box" is the official accompaniment), instead playing John Coltrane's "After the Rain", which echoed across the waters and around the cliffs, over images of Alice following the White Rabbit into another world. If that weren't enough, musician Simon Fisher Turner then gave an improvised live accompaniment to Paramount's 1924 Peter Pan, supported by electronic wizardry and a local drummer. It was, without doubt, one of the best nights of my movie-going life.