CITIZEN JULING
A
road movie through Thailand’s
soul.
CO-DIRECTOR
& PRESENTER: KRAISAK CHOONHAVAN is Thailand’s
most outspoken human rights activist in the political arena; his area of
expertise being Burma
and the Muslim South. At the time of the filming of Citizen Juling, he
was the senator for Korat province, chairman of the Senate House Committee on
Foreign Affairs and member of the Senate House Committee on Southern Security
and Human Rights and, as such, became one of Thaksin Shinawatra government’s
fiercest critics. Being high on the Prime Minister’s blacklist, he took
considerable risks by repeatedly going South to make this film. After the
military coup d’etat that removed that administration from power in September
2006, he served on the Independent Commission for Study and Analysis of the
Formation and Implementation of Drug Suppression Policy, investigating
extra-judicial killings in the Thaksin regime’s so-called ‘War on Drugs’ in
which some 3,000 people lost their lives.
After the elections of December 2007 which brought Thaksin’s politicians
back in power, Kraisak has become an opposition member of parliament. He is also active in cultural affairs, being
instrumental in the drafting of many art supportive initiatives and
legislation, such as the setting up of the Ministry of Culture and its Office
for Contemporary Art, and the Bangkok Centre for Contemporary Art.
CO-DIRECTOR
& CINEMATOGRAPHER: MANIT SRIWANICHPOOM is Thailand’s best known photo-artist
in the international art world. His work, including the iconic ‘Pink Man’
series, his high-gloss satire on Asian contemporary aspirations and consumerist
culture, is collected by museums and private collectors all over the world,
including the Maison Europeen de la Photographie in Paris.
As an art activist, he contributed to the founding of the Ministry of
Culture’s Office for Contemporary Art and the Bangkok Centre for Contemporary
Art. In 2007 he was awarded the highly prestigeous Higashigawa photography
prize (Japan),
and is cited by Phaidon Press’ Blink as one of 100 most interesting
photographers in contemporary art today.
CO-DIRECTOR,
WRITER & EDITOR: ING K is a Thai writer, painter and filmmaker. Although best known in Thailand as the
author of ‘Behind the Postcard’, an environmental activist handbook
disguised as a travelogue, she has since switched from environmental
investigative journalism to writing about film and poetry. As a filmmaker, she
made three documentaries: Thailand for Sale (writer), Green Menace:
the Untold Story of Golf (writer-director) and Casino Cambodia
(writer-director), which were broadcast on TV and shown in film festivals
around the world but never in her own country. Her last film, My Teacher
Eats Biscuits (writer-director), an experimental John Waters-esque 16 mm
feature, was banned by the Thai government censorship board in 1998 and its
director interrogated by the Parliamentary House Committee on Culture, the Arts
and Religious Affairs. Citizen Juling is
her first film in almost ten years.
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