LGBTQ Thai ghost story wins prize in Cannes
Film director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, who won a top prize at the Cannes Festival on Wednesday, recruited a major influencer for his off-the-wall gay comedy with a political punch.
In "A Useful Ghost," Davika "Mai" Hoorne — a model and actor with 18 million followers on Instagram — plays a woman who returns from the dead and haunts a vacuum cleaner to comfort her husband.
The film features sexy ghosts and a brawl between electrical appliances, but is also a meditation on sweeping unpleasant political events under the carpet.
It won the top prize in the Critics' Week sidebar section of the Cannes film festival on Wednesday.
In Thailand, LGBTQ love or coming-out stories are common, Ratchapoom said during the festival.
"But I want queer characters to do more than that, to do more politics as well," he said. "We need more diverse queer stories to be told."
In his wacky satire, the ghost's in-laws are at first deeply displeased that she has returned, but then they put her to work hunting down another lost soul disturbing the family factory.
A minister takes note of her talent, and brings her in to find and terminate the dissident ghosts that are haunting his home, including people killed in real-life deadly protests.
In 2010, more than 90 people were killed, the vast majority of them civilians, when the army cracked down on so-called "Red Shirt" protests demanding new elections after former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted in a coup.
After the demonstrations, there was "a lot of debris, mess on the street and the city of Bangkok started this campaign to cleanse" it, the filmmaker said.
People with water and brooms appeared out of nowhere "to cleanse the blood, the dirt ... all the evidence, and I found it pretty weird."
He recounted once reading a story about authorities cutting down a mango tree to ensure no one would remember an officer executing a suspected Communist under it.
"In Thailand, the state always tries to erase something they don't like," he said.
The film's lead actress Davika — who also starred as a ghost more than a decade ago in Thailand's highest-grossing film "Pee Mak" — is among his fans.
You have to be "very brave to shoot this kind of story, to speak up globally," she said.
"Because in Thailand, most of us are not allowed to say this," she added, without elaborating.
Thaksin, some of whose supporters were killed in 2010, returned from exile to Thailand in 2023, with his party taking over government that year and his daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra becoming prime minister the following year.
He remains popular with his support base, but he has long been disliked by Thailand's pro-royalist and military establishment. Thaksin is due to appear in court in July in a royal defamation case.
Thailand legalized same-sex marriage in January, the largest nation in Asia to do so.
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