The Shnit International Short Film Festival took place at Lido cinema from the 7th to the 11th of October. The festival is a global event featuring shorts from all over the world, eight Thai films were featured over two consecutive evenings as part of the ‘Made In Thailand’ screening.
Here’s a review of all the Thai films taken as a whole followed by a quick rundown of each the films.
Each short film is focused on characters stuck in the past in one way or another. The dynamic of an elder, respected member of the community lecturing a young person on what is wrong with modern society comes up in five of the movies.
These films generally avoid judgement of the characters and manage to empathise with both sides.
In ‘Enlightenment’ a monk tries and fails to elicit an understanding of Buddhism from a troubled young girl and ‘Once Upon A Time In Tungyahlaum’ a student continually disobeys his teacher. Two films feature village elders trying to galvanise their community, in ‘Echoes From The Hill’ the focus is on tradition over development in ‘Gen A’ the village elder wants to develop the village but has to learn that his grandson’s use of the internet is the best way to get people together to help. ‘1428’, the only film of the two evenings based on a true story set in the past, bridges the gap between a young Thai conscript on mandatory military service and old soldier who believes in his mission.
In the other three, however, the main characters use a newly introduced idea to move on from their individual issue.
In ‘Ma Nyien Chan’ a Burmese migrant girl sees an opportunity to help her family, in ‘We Used To Love Each Other’ a woman recently split from her partner learns to drive as a way to lure him back, and in ‘Deleted’ a woman who is being haunted by her husband’s death through her social media takes a proactive approach to move on.
The one theme that runs through all the movies is the importance of moving forward as an individual and as a community, whilst retaining a collective identity.
The first evening:
Enlightenment:
An aging forest monk discovers a woman attempting to hang herself from a tree, he stops her and tries to explain why suicide is not the answer by quoting Buddhist teachings. This fails to have any impact on her so he takes her back to her village where he discovers an uncomfortable reality about his interpretation of spirituality and its place in modern society.
Ma Nyien Chan:
A 14 year old Burmese girl living in Samut Sakhon juggles studying in first grade and living in fear of being caught by immigration police. Forced to translate for her mother at school she appears too shy to relay the compliments the teacher gives her. The only thing that marks her out as Burmese is the chalk on her face, otherwise she appears to have adapted to local life. Later, the young girl sees an opportunity to buy Thai passports for her family and so drops out of school and works fulltime with her mother in a food processing plant to help raise the money.
Once Upon A Time In Tungyahlaum:
A student named O spends every night staring at the stars through his telescope, obsessed with aliens he and his school friends decide that one of their teachers is an alien. They attempt to prove this by following the methods used for identifying aliens from various Hollywood movies. These scenes play out first in O’s mind, where he mashes together different popular sci-fi movies. The action is then cut together with scenes from a mock tourism promotional video which explains that the town has corn fields and nothing else. Through these videos we learn the town’s corn fields are being damaged and O and his friends are convinced it’s aliens.
Echoes From The Hill:
A documentary about a Karen tribe in the hills of northern Thailand. A village elder explains the laws and customs of the simple tribe and proudly describes their connection to nature. As he talks about the village and the community he makes references to the dangers of overdevelopment and deforestation. The forest is due to be destroyed to make way for a dam, the documentary takes us inside a hearing where the village representatives voice their concerns about the project to a committee and the construction company responsible for building the dam. The film does a good job of juxtaposing the village elder’s love for the hill tribe culture with the pragmatic approach taken by the community’s representatives at the committee hearing.
The second evening:
We Used To Love Each Other:
Set in a parking lot in a northern Thai city, a man teaches a woman to drive. As the conversation unfolds we learn they’re a recently split couple, she appears to be using the driving lessons as an excuse to get close to him. Constantly referencing how she used to drive him around she slowly reveals and apparent sadness at being single and that she had expected to be married with a family by now. The film attempts to show the result of Thai society’s increasing acceptance of women marrying at an older age, or not at all.
Deleted:
A woman loses her husband in an accident, years later she is ready to move on and raise her daughter when suddenly someone using his Facebook account contacts her. Filmed as a standard horror flick with slamming doors and the ‘quiet-quiet-BANG’ technique, the story is actually a tale of how to truly move on from a tragedy and that modern technology requires us to be more proactive about where we should apply our energy.
Gen A:
An elderly figure in a northern village is discontent with his grandson’s obsessive phone use, distracted by a project to develop the village he ignores the obvious changes happening with the village’s younger demographic. Trying to gain support from local people is tough, however he soon realizes that his grandson has been utilizing his phone to record the development efforts and then share it with his friends, which in turn brings the community together in a modern way.
1428:
Set during the short border conflict between Thailand and Laos from December 1987 – February 1988 two Thai soldiers, a young engineer and an older para-military border guard, team up to secure a hill on the border. The young engineer wants to run, not understanding the reasons for the conflict, the older border guard appears to have more invested in completing his mission. They march through villages, struggling to communicate with the inhabitants, before linking up with the rest of their contingent.