How Ten Years Thailand, inspired by controversial Hong Kong film, reflects on history and politics
Ten Years Thailand, which premiered at Cannes, takes a dystopian look at the country’s military dictatorship and is less direct than the Hong Kong original, relying on metaphors to avoid falling foul of the authorities
In the first chapter of the four-part omnibus feature Ten Years Thailand, a group of soldiers and policemen storm a photographic exhibition at an art gallery in Bangkok, and demand that the manager removes two photographs they deem offensive.
Insisting “there must be something else going on” at the gallery, the officers also chastise the foreign-educated Thai photographer for being ignorant of how “ordinary people” might get the “wrong idea” by looking at the photographs.
It’s an Orwellian tale which seems to sit perfectly with the premise of Ten Years Thailand, a portmanteau offering four different dystopian visions of what the Southeast Asian country could be like a decade from now.
The original Hong Kong one is sort of a warning of too much interference from China, so it’s very concrete. But when we translate it and do it in Thailand … we can’t be that direct, we have to use metaphors to try to talk about issues in a disguised way
But Sunset, as Aditya Assarat’s short film was titled, was actually drawn from real, contemporary events. It was based on a military raid on June 15, 2017, when 20 soldiers and plain-clothes policemen descended on two galleries in the Thai capital and asked the staff to take down several photographs from their exhibitions.