The dirt road is dry and red, scorched by the Isan sun. The headmaster is wary, sardonic, and enervated by the heat. The students, or at least some of them, are bored and ironic ("What do you want to be when you grow up?" a teacher asks. "A bank robber," he deadpans.) Next to this poor state school is a forest, sun-dappled, mysterious and probably haunted. Girls are warned not to go in there because they may never come back out.
This is the strange setting of Paa (The Forest), a film by Bangkok-based Paul Spurrier. A Thai movie in its looks and body despite the director being British, The Forest premiered earlier this year at Udine International Film Festival and will get a one-screen release at SF CentralWorld on Sept 15. Part horror, part coming-of-age drama, and part portrait of rural life, the film features an all-Thai cast who speaks mostly a Northeastern dialect. The story of a schoolgirl and a feral devil-boy slips in and out between sun-baked realism and eerie fantasy vibes.
Spurrier, a filmmaker who also runs the Friese-Greene cinema club on Sukhumvit, is a long-time resident of Bangkok with an affinity with the Northeast. In 2005 not long after he moved here, he made the feature film P (pronounced Phee, or "ghost" in Thai), about a provincial girl skilled in black magic who comes to Bangkok and ends up in a gogo bar. It enjoyed a modest success since it was sold to 30 countries and travelled a number of festivals, though for the director, the major disappointment was that the film never got a release in Thailand.
"When I was making P, I thought I was making a Thai film. But where it succeeds was international -- people regarded it as a farang film made in Thailand," he says. "This time I tried harder to get deeper, to make a film that a Thai audience might like. I would love it if somebody came out of the movie and saw me and said 'oh, you're a farang'. That would mean I've made something credible as a Thai film."
That a movie is Thai or not Thai is hardly the most relevant issue in today's filmmaking structure in which cross-border finance and inspiration rules. And yet The Forest is clearly made with a specific impression of a time, place and culture: the story opens with a new teacher, who's just left monkhood, arriving at a school in a remote Northeastern village where the headmaster welcomes him with reluctance. One of the students in his class is a girl called Jah (Wanasa Wintawong), who soon goes into the forbidden forest near the village and encounters a wild boy (Thanapol Kamkunkam), who may or may not be a forest spirit. The elements of mystery and suspense is fused with the harsher fact of an alcoholic father, school bullying and a sense of forlorn isolation that wraps around the village.
Spurrier said he drove 3,000km in total looking for a location in Isan. He found a school in Udon Thani that fit the image he had in his mind, and proceeded to audition schoolchildren and villagers for the film.
Paul Spurrier.
"We spent 10 days visiting the schools [in the area]," says the writer-director. "We gave a little presentation, showed them the camera, explained how a film was made. Then we asked who'd like to be actors. Through that process we found the two kids. The leading girl was from a school about 16km away. All the other kids came from the school where we shot. After we finished shooting, we bought new school uniforms for all the students there."
As the name indicates, the film hinges around the presence of the forest, which stands in for a force of nature, primitivism and superstition.
As he envisions it, The Forest is a story of how reality weaves in and out from fantasy -- the new teacher, coming from the cloistered world of monkhood, has returned to reality, while the girl who endures the tough reality of life retreats into the unreal sanctuary of the forest.
"My idea that this forest is so impossibly big that once you go in you're in a different world. We shot in several locations in Isan, including on Phu Kradueng in Loei province," he says.
"Then sometimes when you go to these villages in the rural, they're beautiful and totally idyllic and everybody's friendly. But like anywhere else in the world, once you delve beneath the surface you find the claustrophobia, the problems and the politics. I want to get the idea that the village is baked by the sun the whole time until everyone is sort of dry and jaded."
First arriving to Thailand in 1999 to make an elephant documentary for BBC, Spurrier kept returning here, soon deciding to settle down in Bangkok. Ever since he has taken various freelance contracts directing TV series for Kantana, as well as teaching courses in film production.
A few years ago he found an old shop house on Sukhumvit 22, moved there and set up Friese-Greene, a membership cinema club with 10 plush seats where he screens classic films.
As a farang making a film in Thailand, Spurrier, who can converse fluently in Thai, realises the cultural threshold that at once hinders and benefits him as a storyteller.
The script of The Forest was written in English. It was translated into Thai, but once on set in Isan, he decided to merely stick with the structure and narrative of each scene, and allowed the young cast to improvise most of the dialogue in their dialect. For him it worked better that way.
His status as both an insider and outsider of the Thai culture intrigues him.
"You can learn the culture. You can research, you try to learn the language," Spurrier says. "But you will always have a different view. It's inevitable.
"Then you look at people like Ang Lee when he made Sense and Sensibility. What a bizarre thing for a Taiwanese director to do that! But every now and again if you're lucky, an outsider's view can illuminate. Hopefully it can give a different and interesting perspective."
opens at SF CentralWorld on Sept 15.
Paa (The Forest)
