Chulayarnnon Siriphol

The film follows the conventions of Thai cinema during the Cold War, where every actor is dubbed by the voice that suits their roles. The hero sounds heroic and the villain sounds villainous. Ang, a transgender sex worker with a pretty, feminine voice is assigned a special mission as an undercover spy. She disguises herself as a cisgender man to enter into a romantic relationship with Jit, a belligerent yet idealistic student activist with an evil voice. Ang must extract important information from Jit. However, the mission goes awry as she slowly falls for him. Apolitical at first, Ang is slowly awakened by Jit to see the other world where people speak in another way.

In 2013, the filmmaker’s ownership of a work was revoked by his commissioners. In response, he distributed 100 copies of the award certificate and re-rendered the film 100 times on DVD, the quality of each successive version increasingly degraded until the original work became unrecognisable. Each DVD was sold as an edition of the film for 100 baht. The performance is compared to the replacement of the Khana Ratsadon plaque—a symbol of democracy in Thailand — with a royalist plaque after it mysteriously vanishes. But it is resurrected in various guises and contexts, including the aforementioned DVD. By destabilising the notion of authenticity, this tongue-in- cheek docufiction embraces meaning-making from below as resistance in a totalitarian regime.

"Viriyaporn Boonprasert" is the name of a filmmaker who has been making social satire films since 2012, and no one knows who she is until now. But Viriyaporn's films reflect the condition of Thai society and Thai politics in the past to the present.