BAYTONG (Thailand, 2003)
Directed by: Nonzee Nimibutr
Starring: Poowarit Poompuang, Jeeranan Manoojam, Saranya Kruengsai
A last-minute addition to our schedule, but a film so powerful that we couldn’t let it pass us by. The director of the Thai supernatural blockbuster, Nang Nak, helms this intensely emotional film about how one lives in a world alongside terrorism. A young Buddhist monk, Tum, leaves the monastery, where he’s spent all his life, to look after his niece when his sister is killed in a terrorist attack on a train. Moving to the South of Thailand, which has a large Muslim population, Tum tries to navigate the ways of this fallen world: figuring out how to avoid temptations of the flesh, how to live among the people whom he considers responsible for killing his sister, and how to zip up his fly without castrating himself. Tum’s brilliant comic performance anchors this film, and the movie moves from humor to heartbreak as he forms attachments to the physical world that, invariably, cause pain and suffering. But suffering is the price of living with other people. Told with a deep humanity, in the gentle spirit of Korea’s Christmas in August, this flick is an emotional “how to” manual on living with other humans. We may kill, we may torture, we may hate, but in the end we have no choice: we have to learn to live with one another, or die.