A number of years ago, I was in Vientiane, Laos preparing to take the train that evening to Bangkok. I was traveling with a friend, Lucas Li, who was also a film maker and neither of us knew what would greet us when we arrived back in Bangkok in the morning. The events the past several weeks had thrown the whole region into turmoil. Protests by the 'yellow shirts' had moved from the parliament house to the airports and no flights were coming in or out of Thailand. It didn't really matter too much to either of us, Lucas was meeting family in Bangkok and I didn't have anywhere I had to be for a few weeks. Before we left to go our separate ways the next morning, I mentioned to Lucas that he should think about developing a film about what was happening here. A few months later, Lucas and I met up back in Australia, while in Thailand a new government was in power and protest against that government was being lead by the 'red shirts'. With these new developments, I brought up the subject of a film again and we talked about different ways we could approach this.
Fast forward to this years Australian International Documentary Conference and again we were talking seriously about developing a film on the Thai political landscape. This time we felt we had a pretty good handle on how to approach this type of film. The idea was to make the film more about the people rather than the groups or political ideology. We would want to include families from various socio-economic strata and political leanings in Thai society and investigate how the political machinations have affected them and where they think the solutions lie.
As luck would have it, Lucas will be in Thailand just before the upcoming election to help a family member on a unrelated project. We plan to use this opportunity to canvas opinion amongst the Thai people and find suitable participants for our film. This blog will serve as forum for what we find and hopefully help shape our film.
No comments:
Post a Comment