Thai film debut at busan International Film Fest
The Thai film Nakorn-Sawan premieres at the Busan International Film Festival with a look at a family’s joys and sorrows
Memory and fact, fiction and documentary, characters and lives — perhaps they’re not all that distinguishable, and that’s why they all mingle freely in the Thai film that just had a world premiere at the 23rd Busan International Film Festival this past weekend. Nakorn-Sawan (literally, “paradise city”, and also a name of a province) is the feature debut by Puangsoi Aksornsawang, a young filmmaker whose delicate sensibility is attuned to the joy and sorrow of family life.
The film, which Puangsoi did as her master’s thesis at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, consists of two distinct parts, each employing two distinct cinematic devices: a family documentary shot casually in hand-held in which the director is heard talking to her parents around their home in Songkhla; an autobiographical fiction film in which a woman (played by Prapamonton Eiamchan) and her family are performing the ash-floating rite on a river in Pak Nam Po, a delta in Nakhon Sawan province.
It’s not hard to tell that the woman in the second part is a stand-in for the director, Puangsoi, and that the two parts of the film mirror the details of each other, with its emotional centre on the death of the filmmaker’s mother. Together the two parts make up a diary of an artist (and a daughter) who seems to be using the meta-reality of film to reconcile and revisit her own memory, especially the sad parts that refuse to leave her in peace.
Nakorn-Sawan is one of many Thai films showing in Busan — Asia’s most prominent film festival — and the only one to be having a world premiere. The film will show in Bangkok later. We speak to Puangsoi in Busan about the film.
Why did you choose to tell the story in two parts?
I think all storytelling borrows from memories. And with memory, you don’t know if it’s true or not, if it actually happened or you just remember that it happened. Memory isn’t always fact. Based on that, I use my memory as a basis of a fiction. But altogether, I think what you see is qualified as my memory. Why did you call the film Nakorn-Sawan? I wasn’t from Nakhon Sawan [the province]. The documentary part of the film, where I talk to my father, was shot in my hometown in Songkhla. But it’s a tradition in my family, as in many other families, to perform the ash-floating rite [following someone’s funeral] at Pak Nam Po, a district in Nakhon Sawan province, because it’s believed that the spirit of the dead would be carried to heaven. When my mother passed away, we went to Nakhon Sawan to do that. The name Nakhon Sawan can be read as an irony — perhaps there’s no heaven.
The documentary part is an intimate family home video; the second part is more polished, more detached. How do you reconcile the two styles of the film?
I shot the first part without intending to turn it into a movie. But when I decided to make a feature film, I tried to turn the dialogue in that documentary I shot into lines for characters to speak, to spin that memory into fiction. And I wanted the two parts of the film to look different — perhaps even to the point that you can’t see me in the fiction part of it.
Your mother is a strong presence in the film, and your relationship with her gives the film its heart-aching sentiment.
When I filmed her, I didn’t feel anything special. It’s in the editing process that I felt resigned to the inevitability of what happened. When you edit a film, you have to look at everything very closely — it’s a forensic process — and that’s when you feel what you don’t know you’re feeling before.
Gender equality has been at the centre of the film industry. As a woman director — there are many in Thailand in fact — what’s your take on it?
I don’t think we should necessarily distinguish between male and female directors. You watch a film — and that’s that, it’s the quality of the film that matters. It’s not always true that a woman can make a film about women better than a man can. All of this distinction is physical, and while that may be important, what’s more important is what’s inside, isn’t it?
What’s more important is what’s inside
Nakorn-Sawan will open in Thailand early next year.