AGRARIAN UTOPIA (AGRARIAN UTOPIA)

Thailand - 2008 - Digital, 122 min.

Director:
  URUPHONG RAKSASAR
Sript: Uruphong Raksasad
Production: Extra Virgin
Cast: Prayad Jumma, Somnuek Mongmeung
Section:
  Competition
Screenings:
CCCB Auditori - 02/05 - 20:00
CCCB Auditori - 06/05 - 18:00

Uruphong Raksasad, whose 2006 debut Stories from the North attracted favourable reviews on the festival circuit, should with his latest work Agrarian Utopia choose to tackle his country's problems in such an uncompromising and direct fashion. Though the title evokes the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, who tried to create an equal society based on rural cultivation, Raksasad intent is to capture a long-lost tradition that is slowly vanishing. Shot around the filmmaker's village in Chiang Rai, in order to show how a muddy rice paddy is tilled throughout the seasons, he even rented a piece of land. He offered local farmers the yield if they would work it in the traditional way. Without machines, without electricity and with no profits in mind. It looks so ordinary, yet it is fiction. No matter how much the world is evolving, how much the country is going through economic, political and social changes, they still cannot grasp that ideology of happiness.

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