Editor’s Note: Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors is a semi-documentary movie that follows the daily life of an elderly farmer from the countryside near Chiang Mai. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and screened recently at World Film Festival Bangkok. More information on how the movie was shot is below the review.
Hey, he’s in it for the money.
Leung Neaw has no problem being followed by a camera for THB10,000. It’s like Real World: Rural Thailand. Moments like these make you realize people are all the same.
However, Leung Neaw’s reality veers towards extinction. His life is simple: he gives alms to monks, gather vegetables in the woods, assists planting rice, and accepts that nature is punishing people for cutting down all the trees. There are moments when it seems he is just a big child, often chuckling when a silly thought enters his mind and playing with a slingshot just to see how far the stone goes.
The movie is almost three hours long. Most of the time it’s Leung Neaw walking and the camera following him. However, each time your mind begins to wander, he pulls out another ancient contraption that has you guessing what he’ll do with it or surprises you with a rare smile. After a while the movie resembles what your meditation teacher always taught you to imagine; a beautiful woods, with a running creek, and you’re laying peacefully in the grass. The movie itself is a meditation on the past, a way of life that seems more foreign than the ends of the earth.
Wouldn’t it be nice to live peacefully in the countryside, as a farmer, with no worries? Sure, but you’d have to have one of those gadgets from Men in Black that erases your memory. The movie changed my reactionary perceptions for a societal retreat to rural existence, and made me much more enthusiastic about urban farming. The necessity for growing your own food is vital, however leaving behind the cultural vibrance of city life would be extremely difficult. Because, well, the country is a bit boring. Can the world be balanced? Or is it destined to continue in it’s abundance of urbanization?
The film also questions Thai identity, for many of the conversations Leung Neaw has speak of where he’s from, if he’s Thai, or if he’s hill tribe. It questions hill tribe identity, much like American Indians may feel they are not US American since they lived on the land first. However, at 8 o’clock every morning, the Thai national anthem echoes through what’s left of the forest.
The shots are rough, and often out of focus, but the movie gives excellent insight. The length is crucial. An hour-long documentary gets you in and out with a brief knowledge of the issue, but three hours forces you to really think about, question, and examine the content.
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From the Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors website:
The film is a semi documentary, semi fictional… It was shot with out a script and all persons in the film are real people from the location… So they are pretty much reacting and in conversation with each other with out plan or direction. There is no narrative except for the fact that we were following Lung Neaw as he would go through his day in his daily life, ie. Walking to his old rice field and resting in his little Sala by the field, picking Ma Kua puang to sell for some money, going to a local garden/forest to pick up herbs and vegetation to make dinner, bathing in the river in front of his house… Etc. But in actuality, the time (seasonal) sequence were switch we shot in the winter (dry season) first and then we shot rain season, but because of flow of time and space we started the film in the rainy season and ended the film in the dry season. However, everything that appear in the film appeared in it order of shots and in order of time/ action continuum. So it not a documentary and not a narrative, perhaps it’s more of a portraiture.
