The Terrorists REVIEW: The days of red-shirts by Raffaele Meal
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*The original version is in Italian, this is the google translated version.
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The days of red T-shirts
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The documentary addresses Thunska Pansittivorakul, with a very personal approach, the street protests that have ignited in the spring of 2010, Bangkok. The claims of so-called “Red Shirts” to give an autobiographical reflection and experimental. [synopsis]
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Since the squares and main streets of Bangkok have seen the harsh demands of the members dell’UDD (Democracy Against Dictatorship from United Front), smothered in bitter and bloody clashes with the army, not even a year has passed. Yet, especially in the West, no one seems to have more memory, one of the most important geographical areas of Southeast Asia continues to live on the gulf, close to the final descent into civil war, and few seem to have at heart the future. So it is not it a coincidence that The Terrorists , fifth feature of the thirty-eight Thai filmmaker Thunksa Pansittivorakul, opens in the black of a moonless night: a small boat three men are engaged in fishing. The rural Thailand, which mostly married lifting the mass of recent years (experience in its own way, even contradictory, since it fails to come off the dangerous centralizing figure of Thaksin Shinawatra, the “Berlusconi thai” now in exile abroad) , then breaks out on the screen, literally bursting from the darkness.
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The Terrorists work is wavering, rational and passionate, that through the weapon of the documentary is also proposed as a diary and autobiographical reflection on the social body of a country living (like many others, let’s underline) in a state of illusory freedom, the taste vaguely liberal. Without being groped by contesting mere hagiography, Thunksa tackles the question of putting directly into play: his narrator’s voice that goes beyond the simple listing of historical fact to propose a kind of self-reflective examination, in which the director talks with the ideal mother, who as a child was forced to abandon the capital to seek refuge in the south of the country, during one of the many crises that have battered democratic Thailand. Family album that is revolutionary and political pamphlet, The Terrorists presents with unusual shapes, at least for what concerns the pragmatic idea that you can have documentary art: the duty to remember the warm days of April and May of 2010, with a lot of shooting style “guerrilla movie” among the protesters, and even exhausting Thunksa supports a comprehensive staging of the body, which reaches its climax in the long sequence of masturbation, dominated by the narrative voice reminiscent of the actions defamation and demonization by the extreme right to which he is a street movement. A movement made up of peasants, workers and fishermen, but also by intellectuals, students, communists, homosexuals, elements of society against which it is thrown with no holds barred the media campaign of the reactionary right and realistic, ready to alert the population against those who, in their view, would undermine the moral “political, religious and monarchical” of the nation.
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The resistance as a banner raised by Thunska Pansittivorakul not simply the politics, but also sexual, with the homoeroticism that is transformed into a symbol of a radical stance, and above all intellectual. Magmatic and amazing journey in the folds of a reality next to us but completely abandoned to their fate, The Terrorists presents itself as one of the most compelling visions of the sixty-first edition of the Berlinale. Even in the German event, unfortunately, is passed over in silence: the sign of the times?
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Raffaele Meal
(Source: cineclandestino.it)
