The elephant and the man, walking down the road to redemption and encountering the wounded and the marginalised, the madmen and the prostitutes. In the film Pop Aye, which will kick off Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2017 this evening (see sidebar), the fine-tusked beast accompanies the lost soul as the duo find their way home from Bangkok to the Northeast.
It is a Thai story, told in the Thai language with Thai actors across the Thai landscape, city and rural, chaotic and lonesome. But in the world where imaginations cross borders and demarcations, Pop Aye -- a high-profile Southeast Asian film that premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January -- is a debut feature film by a Singaporean director Kirsten Tan. The crew and cast, including the elephant, are all Thai, and thus the film serves as a perfect opener for a festival conceived to showcase regional creativity of the Asean nations.
Tan is in Bangkok for the screening tonight, where she's excited to see the reaction at the first viewing by a Thai audience (there will be two more screenings on Sunday and Monday). Pop Aye will go on general release in Thai cinemas later.
"In each place that I've shown the film, the reaction has been different," says Tan, who premiered the film at Sundance in the US, where it won best script, and released it earlier this month in Singapore.
"Since the film is about Thailand, it's important to know what the Thai audience think about it."
In Pop Aye, disillusioned architect Thana (played by Thaneth Warakulnukroh, rock singer and actor from the 1990s) runs into an elephant he once kept when he was a boy in Loei province. Thana is going through a bad patch, and he decides to set out on a long road trip with the beast, from the capital back to their hometown. It is a quest narrative and a road movie along which they meet an assortment of oddballs and heartbreaks, before the journey ends in a sort-of revelation.
Drawing from her experience, writer-director Tan was not an ingénue to the craziness and drama of the Thai capital. Around 2005, she spent two years living in Bangkok, running a T-shirt store at Chatuchak Weekend Market and jamming with her Thai friends in a band. It was the happy days, she said, "the free-spirited days". To her, the city was a stark contrast to Singapore, and the experience was integral to her creative growth when she went on to study in New York and became a filmmaker.
"It was the formative years of my life," said Tan, 35. "When I came to Bangkok, I was enamoured by it. I had lived in Korea one year before [at an artist's residency] and I spent the rest of my life in Singapore. I felt that Thailand was completely opposite to Singapore, which was a sterile and clinical place. I'm not saying it's better or worse, but it's a totally different world here even though it's just two hours away."
Concrete slabs, vagabond elephants and construction sites -- these are some of the images of the city Tan remembers best. Especially the elephants. This was the mid-2000s, before a clean-up campaign prevented mahouts from marching "unemployed" beasts from the provinces to peddle in Bangkok. When Tan was shooting her short film in Thailand in 2009, she also saw a group of boys pulling along an elephant.
The image, she says, stuck with her all through the years.
"I remember feeling so bad for the animal," she said. "But it also felt surreal."
"[In conceiving Pop Aye], I started with my feeling about Thailand and what I wanted to talk about: the inevitability of the passage of time and how we have to accept it. Then I came up with a story to talk about all those things."
Speaking some Thai, Tan got a little help from her Thai friends to pull things off. The entire creative crew of Pop Aye, except Tan, was Thai. The script was originally in English, which was translated into Thai whereby Tan asked three friends to revise, one of them the award-winning writer Prabda Yoon. For Tan, there's nothing more irritating than a foreign filmmaker coming to make a film about another culture and getting everything wrong -- like Hollywood often does. And she made it a priority to make everything as authentic as possible.
Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, is the elephant. The animal used in the film is called Bong, and even though he's "super-nice" and a proficient actor, it's the logistics surrounding the movement of the beast that required patience and hard work.
"We knew it would be difficult when we wrote the script. But only when we started shooting did I release how much of a challenge it was," she said. "The number of permits we have to clear and getting permission to shoot on location -- in one scene we had the elephant inside a house -- these are the real challenges. And we shot the film in April. In between takes we had to take Bong out and water him down because it was so hot."
Making a film about an elephant in Thailand, Tan realises, means courting interpretative reading and symbolism. For one thing, the animal has long been a de facto image of exotica, majesty and wilderness -- all at once -- whenever a foreigner looks at Thailand. In fact, one of the first foreign film ever shot in Siam, in 1927, was called Chang, or Elephant; the directors were Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack, who would go on to make the original King Kong in 1933. The allure of the pachyderm, its gentle amplitude and its million-year-old eyes, have since attracted a number of artists to treat it as something larger than life with a deep association to the land.
Tan has a simpler idea though.
"I definitely wanted to avoid the symbolism of the elephant. But I know it's such a strong symbol and it's unavoidable for people to read into it," said Tan. "I stayed with Bong for three weeks to observe his daily life. I wanted to keep the elephant in the film as real and specific as possible. I don't want to make a Disney elephant. I treat him as a character, and that's what the movie is about."
Pop Aye opens the Bangkok Asean Film Festival tonight at SF CentralWorld. Repeat screenings on Sunday, April 30 at 3pm and Monday, May 1 at 3pm. Contact www.facebook.com/BangkokAseanFilmFestival/ for details.
The Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2017 is taking place from today until May 1 at SF CentralWorld. This is the third year the Ministry of Culture has hosted the festival aimed at celebrating filmmaking creativity within Asean countries. Admission is free, though you have to book seats in advance online. Visit www.facebook.com/BangkokAseanFilmFestival/ for detail or contact 02-643-9100 or admin@mpc.or.th
Singaporean director Kirsten Tan. Bangkok Asean Film Festival
Bangkok Asean Film Festival 2017
The 2017 edition of the festival is the biggest so far, with 22 titles on the menu. Ten films are in Asean Competition, nine in the showcase sidebar, and there are three rare classic films.
Some other contemporary highlights in the festival are:
Solo Solitude Indonesia, directed by Yosep Anggi Noen
The film looks at the life of an activist poet who flees the persecution of the Suharto regime to a small village in Borneo.
Dearest Sister Laos, directed by Mattie Do
This stylish horror-drama from Laos tells the story of a blind woman who can glimpse the shadow of ghosts and her caretaker who just came from the countryside.
Ho Chi Minh In Siam Vietnam, directed by Bui Tuan Dung
The Communist hero Ho Chi Minh spent a few years in the Northeast of Thailand. This film looks at his journey from Bangkok to Udon Thani in 1927.
A Yellow Bird Singapore, directed by K Rajagopal
This tough Singaporean drama looks at the underbelly of wealthy society. A Singaporean-Indian ex-convict tries to find work to support his ex-wife when he meets a Chinese prostitute abused by her pimp.
Turn Left Turn Right Cambodia, directed by Douglas Seok
This Cambodian drama is narrated through songs, telling the story of a young woman with big dreams and how they clash with the traditional lifestyle of her family.
Interchange Malaysia, directed by Dain Said
A police thriller from Malaysia involves a detective who enlists the help of a crime photographer to solve bizarre murder cases.
In The Flesh Thailand, directed by Kong Pahurak
A 17-year-old girl escapes her claustrophobic life and runs into a human smuggler.
Classic films
- The Emerald Jungle (Myanmar, 1934), the oldest surviving film from Myanmar telling the story of a fugitive who falls in love with a woman while on the run.
- Three Maidens (Indonesia, 1956), a family comedy about three sisters.
- The Lion City (Singapore, 1960), a romantic drama that depicts Singapore at the cusp of modernisation.
A Yellow Bird, film
