Tuesday, January 9, 2024 at 7:30pm
Isan Film Group's Tongpan
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Tongpan, Isan Film Group, 1977, 16mm, 60 mins
Consistently cited as one of the most important Thai films of all time, and a key instance of Third Cinema from Southeast Asia, Tongpan is an unvarnished docufiction. Its subject is the human toll taken by development initiatives during Thailand’s mid-1970s experiment in democratization, focusing on the micropolitics of a seminar held in the country’s rural northeast, where participants discuss a proposed mega-dam on the Mekong. The film was created by the Isan Film Group, a collective of former university students who had participated in the popular uprising of 1973 that deposed the country’s military dictatorship, including filmmakers Paijong Laisakul and Euthana Mukdasanit and musician Surachai Jantimatorn. They cast the production with non-actors; the titular character of Tongpan, a displaced villager whose lands had been destroyed by an earlier hydroelectric project, is played by Ong-art Ponethon, a real-life farmer and Muay Thai boxer, who inhabits his role with a tough, brooding posture. In the film, he is invited by a group of students to join in discussions along with other villagers; when he arrives, the talk is dominated by government officials, academics, and a white spokesman who delivers a speech in untranslated English. Meanwhile, Tongpan’s family endures worsening hardships, unaided by a government that claims to be working in their interests.
After Tongpan completed shooting, this reformist period came to a sudden end with the right-wing coup of 1976 and a subsequent massacre of leftist protestors. Many who worked on the production were hunted down by police after the still-unreleased film had been banned as pro-communist. Some of the cast and crew were imprisoned, others fled the country or joined armed resistance groups in the mountains. Though it would eventually screen to acclaim at overseas festivals, in its home country “the film never received a theatrical release and instead entered into a network of makeshift itinerant guerrilla screenings, re-appropriating the spaces used by US sponsored screenings of propaganda films against communism,” scholar Rosalia Engchuan explains. Tongpan, she observes, “unveils the inherent doom of a project of inclusion that was designed to fail, like so many other well-intended projects of democracy, of giving people a voice and a place to sit at the table. But the people do not want to sit at this table. What the people want are other things. What the people want is a better life.”
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.