Surachai Chantimatorn

Tongpan is a 1977 Thai 16 mm black-and-white docudrama that re-creates a seminar that took place in Northeast Thailand in 1975 to discuss the proposed Pa-Mong Dam on the Mekong. Interwoven are sequences depicting a poor farmer, Tongpan, who had lost his land to another dam some years before, and his struggles to make ends meet.

During the Vietnam War, lots of US soldiers fathered illegitimate children with women in Southeast Asia. They often grew up in orphanages, a fate shared by many of these so-called Amerasians. It is the questions of guilt, origin and homeland of these soldiers and children which the film pursues in a semi-documentary manner. In various conversations, GI and Vietnam veteran John Scott meets with people in Thailand who all have to struggle in their own way with the homelessness resulting from this past.

Set in 1939, the early days of World War II in Siam, to Angsumalin meeting one last time with her childhood friend, a young Thai man named Vanus. He is leaving for England for his studies and hopes that Angsumalin will wait for him and marry him when he returns.