Courting disaster

For more than a year, the picturesque beach resort of Khao Lak, in southern Thailand, had been struggling to overcome the havoc wreaked upon it by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. In just a few short, dramatic minutes, lives in this small fishing and tourism community, one of the worst affected places in the country, were turned upside down as people and livelihoods were swept away by a series of giant waves. European holidaymakers, many of them from Sweden, local fishermen, hotel workers, the young and the old; nature didn't discriminate when it unleashed its fury.

In the wake of the disaster, the tourists stopped coming, so those who could sought work elsewhere. Left behind were the old, sick and orphaned. Then, one day, a local production company arrived in the sleepy village saying it was going to make a film and needed extras. It would pay 500 baht ($101) a

day, a significant amount in a country where the minimum wage is 184 baht a day. For the locals, it

was an opportunity to earn some money and perhaps begin rebuilding shattered lives.

Hundreds of flyers were posted in surrounding towns, near empty bars, shops and hotels, and pinned to wooden fences and lamp posts. The yellow flyers, considered insensitive by some because of their call for 'corpses', read: 'Victim, man, woman, girl; any age, any nationality. A lot of people!!!!'

Then a crew from British-based production house Kudos Film and Television, with backing from the BBC and HBO, descended on the small village and, for nine days, filmed scenes of death and devastation for two-part mini-series The Aftermath.

'I'm very angry about it,' says Elizabeth Zana, 61, from her home on the Thai holiday island of Phuket. Zana lost her daughter Natacha, 35, a freelance environmental journalist, who was researching a story on Phi Phi Island when the waves struck. 'Eighty bodies are still not accounted for. Do you think the families of those lost want to see it on television?'