Looking for her lead actor, director Nichaya Boonsiripan spent three months hanging out at the Immigration Service Centre for Legalised Labourers of Three Nationalities (Myanmar, Cambodian and Laos). She finally picked up Aung Naing Soe for the film Myanmar In Love In Bangkok (Ruk Pasa A-Rai), a romantic comedy about love between a Thai woman and a male migrant worker from Myanmar, which is currently showing in selected cinemas.
Lao actress Khamlee Pilawong in The Return, a horror film about dead migrant workers who come back to haunt their wrongdoers.
"We decided from the beginning that we must have Myanmar actors, and we must use the country's language in the film," says Nichaya. "We went scouting for talents at different immigration service centres every day. That day we found Aung Naing Soe, we were ready to give up. I was starting to wonder if we were going about seeking actors in the right way."
The release of Myanmar In Love In Bangkok — the first film that features a romance between a Myanmar male and Thai female — comes at an opportune moment, when the media has been routinely painting migrants of Thailand's neighbouring countries in a bad light, whether they are kicking sand in a tourist's face in Koh Larn, or accused of murdering British tourists in Koh Tao without solid evidence. Blaming migrant workers seems like a convenience, not to mention textbooks that often portray Myanmar people as Thailand's historical villains.
Myanmar In Love In Bangkok doesn't complicate itself with underlying social issues, yet it does mark an attitudinal shift and goes against easy stereotypes. In many Thai films, characters who speak in Myanmar or with hill-tribal accents are often the butt of insensitive jokes, and to cast a Myanmar male as a romantic lead once sounded impossible.
The Asean buzz may be a contributing factor to the change, coupled with the fact that workers from neighbouring countries have become an integral part of Thai's daily lives.
Following the same path, November will see the release of director Sakchai Deenan's Pee Tuang Kuen (The Return), a horror film about the ghost of a Myanmar worker who's killed while in Thailand and returns to take revenge on those who've wronged him. It's a film that clearly takes a stand against ethnic prejudice and social ill-treatment. Sakchai aims to release the film in Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.
Both Myanmar In Love In Bangkok and The Return are small, low-budget films that hope to tap into increasing cross-border interconnectedness. Aimed at a Myanmar audience, Myanmar In Love In Bangkok mostly opened in cinemas in the outskirts of the capital where there are clusters of migrant workers. After its opening weekend, the film doesn't seem to be doing so well. But at Central Rama II, a factory-dense area close to Mahachai, a predominantly Myanmar community, the box office gross was the highest, and some screenings were reportedly packed.
On Sunday, the stars of the film made surprise appearances and were greeted warmly by autograph-seeking fans. There were also requests for the film to be shown in other provinces.
The film, which was first written in Thai and then translated into the Myanmar language for Aung Naing Soe, is a rather trite story about Dan, a migrant worker, and Kay, a Thai tattoo artist (Korravee "Kaew" Pimsook) at Tawanna market, who fall in love, assisted by implausible coincidences and against all odds.
Aung Naing Soe is a 19-year-old half-Myanmar, half-Nepalese first-time actor, who was picking up his passport when Nichaya spotted him. He has been living in Bangkok for three years, first selling clothes in Pratunam, then later at Asiatique.
"Nichaya told me about the storyline, about the character Dan, who moves to Bangkok from Mahachai to work pushing carts in the market. I had to introduced myself in front of a camera and they contacted me about a month later," Aung Naing Soe recalls.
"The film was initially going to be about two Myanmar migrant workers, but the Myanmar actress didn't want to act in a kissing scene, something that is just not done on the screen in Myanmar. She didn't want to kiss for real," he adds.
The light-hearted romantic comedy doesn't touch on the possible issues of classism or xenophobia. In the story, Kay had previously been involved with a Thai male, supposedly of a higher social class because of his unexplained influence and connections with local police.
Only once in the film does Kay mention the complexity of getting into a cross-cultural relationship, hinting at her upper hand as a local. Rather, the film concerns itself with an overlooked, cute love story that shows the demographic make-up of the new Thailand.
"Our lives [Thai and Myanmar] are very connected," says Nichaya. "The stories concerning Lao people and Cambodians have been told. The story of Myanmar people is so close to ours. [But in films and in real life] Thai people make fun of the accents of Myanmar workers here all the time.
"Much of the research was done as we wrote the script. Scouting for locations and casting involved learning about various lifestyles. We found that migrants in Bangkok live a very cosmopolitan lifestyle, with their iPads and iPhones and all that, as opposed to migrants in Mahachai, whose lives revolved more centrally around working," the director adds.
While the film attempts to portray the cross-cultural relationship as quotidian, it's quite a shame that it doesn't push itself further to delve into or dispel stereotypes of migrant workers. Only one scene takes a jibe at the historical animosity between Thailand and Myanmar. As Dan tries to win Kay's attention, a television plays sound from the film Bang Rajan, a war flick about Ayutthaya villagers who put up a fight against the Myanmar army. (It's also a bit of an inside joke — one of Myanmar In Love In Bangkok's producers is also the director of Bang Rajan.)
This may be the first time a Myanmar man falls for a sassy Thai woman, but love stories between Southeast Asian couples have been done on-screen before. The curtain-raiser was Sabai Dee Luang Phrabang, a 2006 film starring Ananda Everingham (who's half-Laos, half-Australian, though he lives and works in Bangkok) as a photographer who falls in love with a Lao beauty. The film was a watershed moment for cross-cultural cinematic efforts and was a modest success both in the Thai and Lao box office. It was followed by two sequels, which told variations of the same story.
All of these films were directed by Sakchai Deenan, who has been opening northeastern borders with his formula of Thai-Lao cast and stories, and who is now moving on to do the same with Myanmar and Cambodia.
Sakchai is now editing The Return, which features Myanmar, Thai, Cambodian and Lao actors.
"The idea is to show that the migrant workers who we see every day have their families waiting back at home. I want to put a little social critique in the film, though I wrap it in the form of a horror movie," says Sakchai. The Return, he adds, is told through several intertwining episodes that take place in Bangkok, Laos and a Myanmar border town.
"I might be hated for saying this, but we Thais sometimes look down on workers from neighbouring countries," he says.
"Our historical textbooks have one line that every student remembers: Thailand has never been colonised. I think that one line has made us believe that we're better, that has made us arrogant. And now the ghost is coming after us."
A Thai girl and a Myanmar boy. Korravee Pimsook and Aung Naing Soe in Myanmar In Love In Bangkok.
