Tongpan

SP BEFF 1 / SAT. 13 SEP, 12.00 / KINEFORUM

18+

Country of production Thailand
Language Thai
Subtitle English
60 min, B/W, 1977

Diselesaikan pasca pembantaian pemberontak politik di Bangkok, 1976, dokumenter-fiksi ini mengetengahkan masalah representasi demokratis. Tongpan bermula tak lama setelah kediktatoran militer Thailand dijatuhkan oleh pemberontakan massa yang digerakkan oleh mahasiswa. Seorang aktivis mahasiswa mengembara ke sebuah desa di wilayah perbatasan Thailand-Laos di sekitaran Mekong. Bercita-cita untuk merangkul semangat baru demokratisasi, suatu penyelenggaraan seminar mendatangkan seorang petani laki-laki ke Bangkok, untuk duduk bersama dengan kelompok intelektual, teknokrat, birokrat laki-laki dan sekretaris perempuan. Cuplikan antara skena-skena yang diperagakan kembali berdasar dari peristiwa seminar di tahun 1975 dan skena-skena yang mengkombinasikan dramatisasi dengan observasi yang subtil ini menunjukkan perjuangan dan kemarahan sehari-hari petani. Sosok Tongpan didasarkan pada kehidupan nyata petani dan diperankan oleh seorang petinju lokal.

Completed just after the massacre of political demonstrators in Bangkok in 1976, this fiction-documentary is a haunting take on the problem of democratic representation. Tongpan begins shortly after a Thai military dictatorship was brought down by a student-led mass uprising. A student activist travels to a village in the red zone on the Thai-Lao border to invite a few villagers to take part in a seminar discussing a proposed dam building project on the Mekong. Aspiring to embrace the newfound spirit of democratisation, the seminar earnestly brings male peasants to a seminar room in Bangkok, to sit at the same big, forbidding table as the male intellectuals, the engineers, the bureaucrats and their female secretaries. Tongpan cuts between re-enacted scenes of a seminar event which had taken place in 1975, and scenes combining dramatisation with subtle observations showing the daily struggles and silent anger of the eponymous peasant. The figure of Tongpan is based on a real life peasant and is performed by a local boxer.