It?s not easy to be a filmmaker in Thailand. Even those who make the same tired transvestite comedies and ?Asian? horror movies (or better yet, tranny horror action comedies) with studio backing do not have it easy, if only because they are condemned to repeat themselves forever. We all must contend with the government film censorship board, which doesn?t permit us to peer into the national soul too deeply, or even at all. When our best-known filmmaker, Aphichartpong Weerasethakul, the son of two doctors, showed two doctors kissing in a hospital in a film about his parents, the dreaded giant scissors came down upon him. In other words, Thai films must never ever reflect Thai society, or else.

And here we are with Citizen Juling, a documentary whose tagline is ?a long strange trip through Thailand?s soul?.  

I?ve put off writing this blog forever. Not that I?ve ever written one before. It?s such a minefield; to commit to the limiting specificity of words things that one can perhaps just get away with visually. The film is so long precisely because it?s a story that must be shown, not told. There is so much I could say about it, yet so much I can?t say.  But shooting it, though physically exhausting and risky, was almost effortless, as if the story had been waiting patiently for us to come; the people in it so ripe to share their pain that sometimes our first question would provoke an outpouring of tears.

Much of the credit for such trust belongs to our ?leading man?, Kraisak Choonhavan, a hugely sympathetic oddball activist politician who has spent years fighting in the senate and the courts against the government?s human rights abuses in the Muslim-majority South. In the film, he was still a senator, chair of the Senate House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He is now an opposition member of parliament.

To most of the world, we are a sunny country of ?happy-go-lucky? (yuck) people. We have so much fun that we?re a den of iniquity. We seem to live in holiday posters; we are sun, sea and sex. Yet any socio-political scientist of any worth would tell you that it?s a country that forces them to burn their textbooks.

We always look happy here in the Land of Smiles, but the past ten years have been intense. Some 2,500 of us, including little kids, have died during the Thaksin Shinawatra government-declared War on Drugs in officially sanctioned extra-judicial killings. In the three Deep South provinces bordering Malaysia, over 3,000 people, both Muslims and Buddhists, have died in what is known gently here as the ?Southern Unrest?.  And as I write this, thousands of people, including my very brave 70 year old aunt, are stoically protesting in the streets around Government House, under constant threat of violence from pro-government thugs. 

Day in, day out, since May 25th they have been sitting there on the hot cement.  Various people speak on the protest stage, mostly denouncing corruption. But when our man Kraisak was asked to speak, he chose to talk about the slaughter in the South. He said it was a crime against humanity.

Because of this, two weeks ago he was sued for defamation by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (once Thailand?s richest man until the courts froze his assets pending massive corruption cases, now also the proud owner of Manchester City football club in England). There was a possibility that Kraisak would be muzzled until the case had run its course. We had already been invited to Toronto, and I spent sleepless nights until I was assured that this case, which has not yet been accepted by the criminal court, did not affect the film or the writing of this blog. Our paranoid reaction was to immediately fedex our exhibition tapes to Toronto, long before deadline--we were promptly congratulated by the festival?s print traffic office on our efficiency!  

Since then?last night as a matter of fact?Thaksin has skipped this morning?s court date and fled to England along with his wife, who has already been sentenced to three years in jail for tax fraud but was out on bail pending an appeal. Analysts say he only sued Kraisak in order to protect his bid for political asylum. Corruption, a white-collar crime, may be acceptable to the British government, but crimes against humanity, eg. mass murder, are somewhat less palatable.

Juling had nothing to do with any of this. She was a 24 year old art teacher who wanted to make the world a better place by volunteering to go South as other teachers fled the ?teacher death zone?, where since 2004 over 80 teachers have been killed by Muslim Separatists. So how do you make a film about a girl who could never give you an interview, because she?s in a coma? It was a fascinating challenge.

When we finished shooting, Kraisak and our other co-director and DP, photo-artist Manit Sriwanichpoom, left me alone with ?Juling?. I was alone in my editing room above a photo-gallery near a temple to Uma, the Hindu Goddess of Devotion. I could barely send an email, and here I was with the Final Cut Pro Handbook and a photo of Teacher Juling torn from a newspaper pinned to the wall.

The last time I edited, it was on a Sony Hi 8 machine (which I sold afterwards via an ad at the local supermarket to a mild-mannered classical pianist and filmmaker, an expat American in Bangkok who turned out to have been a child pornographer on the FBI?s ten most-wanted list. But that?s another story).  I had stopped making films for ten years after my last film was banned by the censors and witch-hunted by the Parliamentary House Committee on Culture, the Arts and Religious Affairs, aka the public morality police. But Juling?s courageous story fell out of the sky on my head. She made me overcome my stupid fears?of technology, of censorship, of the conventions of editing. I realised suddenly that while I had lost enough to be relatively free (or as some would say, insane), she had lost it all. I let her tell the story. On the wall next to her picture I wrote the words ?Very Loose & Very Free?, and then dived straight in. It took us a year, but here we are.