An Irish-American priest talks to the camera as he sits at a table in the slums of Klong Toey, Bangkok, Thailand. It's September 2009.
Father Joseph Maier describes how a hospital contacted him asking if he could look after a little girl who was blind and had Aids. She had been run over - by her parents.
'This is where you really wonder about the world,' the then 69- year-old priest says. 'You can understand warlords and pimps and addicts doing these horrible things. But the parents? Oh, boy! [They] used and abused this child and then tried to kill her. I'm not sure if the devil would compete on this level.'
It's one of several disturbing scenes in a 15-minute film, which its two Australian filmmakers want to turn into a 90-minute documentary, called Father Joe and the Bangkok Slaughterhouse. The central character is Father Joe, a charismatic Redemptorist priest from the United States, who has been living in the Klong Toey slum since 1973. Shortly after he moved in, he set up the Human Development Foundation and its Mercy Centre, which now employs 330 people and runs 22 kindergartens, as well as a hospice, four orphanages and several other establishments, across Bangkok. 'The Slaughterhouse' is a particularly poor area, set around the Klong Toey abattoir, where pigs are killed at night.
The film cuts between Father Joe talking to the camera and him taking the filmmakers around the Slaughterhouse. There are uplifting moments, such as a scene featuring little girls laughing at one of the kindergartens run by the Mercy Centre.
THE AUSTRALIAN-BASED filmmakers, James Lingwood, 60, and Mark Norfolk, 56, have known each other for more than a decade and collaborated on documentaries, features and trailers. Both worked in Hong Kong for many years and together they have formed production company Palmwood Pictures.
Lingwood, who is the director and cameraman of the short film, was in Bangkok in April 2007 and had gone to a hotel to meet potential backers for a feature project he was working on.