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Director’s Profile

Nontawat Numbenchapol was born in 1983 and grew up in Bangkok. He graduated from the Visual Communication Design Department, Faculty of Art and Design, Rangsit University. Numbenchapol is a Thai film director and television screenwriter, widely recognized for his documentary work. In 2013, he completed his first documentary film Boundary (2013), funded by Busan International Film Festival and Art Network Asia. Premiering in the Berlinale Forum, Boundary (2013) earned him the Young Filmmaker award from the Bangkok Critics Assembly. In the same year Numbenchapol completed his second documentary By The River (2013), the first Thai film to receive the Special Mention Award from the Locarno Festival. In 2016 he created a hybrid docu-fiction #BKKY (2016), premiering at the Busan International Film Festival before it received the Jury Award for best feature-length film from Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg, Germany.

Synopsis

Sorn is a 21-year-old heterosexual Shan boy living as an undocumented refugee in Chiang Mai, who escaped the ‘doi’ (mountain) with his little brother. Each day he performs the same monotonous ritual; he wakes up in the afternoon, eats wonton noodles at the local stall, works out at the gym, and lines up to a bell at the gay spa ‒ before performing sexual services for his customers. This job offers a material lifestyle he could otherwise never have, but Sorn feels stuck, invisible to the government and confined in physical and social mobility. To cope, Sorn projects himself in the lives of his clients during their in-bed conversations, where he imagines new identities for himself and hopes for a bright future. But with his Shan friends, Sorn confronts his past through flashbacks of his life on the doi in the Shan State between Myanmar and Thailand, where lived without free will, mandatorily conscripted into the military to fight the Burmese. His Shan friends eventually navigate their own pathways out of the doi boy life, but Sorn cannot find a way out. Throughout the story, Sorn pieces together his identity but only through the lives of others. Finally, no longer projecting to escape, Sorn learns to accept his present life, motivated by sacrifice and love, so his little brother can taste the freedom he himself will never experience.

Achievements

2023 Busan International Film Festival - Jiseok

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