SummaryTwo Burmese immigrants flee their country's civil war in search of a new life in Thailand. Finding work, they focus their efforts on acquiring Thai ID cards. However, when one achieves this goal, their relationship is doomed.
SummaryTwo Burmese immigrants flee their country's civil war in search of a new life in Thailand. Finding work, they focus their efforts on acquiring Thai ID cards. However, when one achieves this goal, their relationship is doomed.
Midi Z’s control of mood, pace and performance builds an engrossing drama that works on the intimate level of a moving human tragedy whilst also providing an insight into the much bigger picture of the problems and heartaches facing the people of Burma.
A combination of tender details – the way Guo carefully picks the fibres from his girlfriend’s skin after a gruelling shift at the factory – and a strikingly surreal approach to a scene in which Lianqing prostitutes herself for the first time makes this unflinching picture a notable addition to the ever-swelling list of films that deal with migration.
Combining a realist setting with a dreamlike style, The Road to Mandalay could easily have become a well-intentioned polemic, yet thanks to Midi Z’s brilliant command of visual metaphors and compassion for his subjects it’s elevated into a an unnervingly immediate portrait of the human cost of displacement.
I found this parable a tad pokey for my tastes, almost sleep-inducing in the middle acts. The title promises a picture with more momentum, a longer “road” journey, and I was disappointed when it settled into how hard it is to get work and get by in Bangkok.
Production Company
Bombay Berlin Film Productions,
CMC Entertainment,
Fine Time Entertainment,
Flash Forward Entertainment,
House on Fire,
Myanmar Montage Films,
Pop Pictures,
Seashore Image Production,
Star Ritz Productions Co.