OMG! We’ve just found out that one of the people behind the krama documentary, a 19 year-old economics student named Sai, is also an action film director!
A year and a half ago he got together with his friends (some of whom can perfect any fighting method after watching a movie clip of it for half an hour), and basically decided to make a kickass 15-minute movie about, well, kicking ass and taking names.
Yeah, there’s some back-story about a gang kidnapping the hero’s two sisters, but it’s the fight sequences which are what really matter. Daring angles, slow-mo, brutal choreography… This is the kind of movie every teenage boy wants to see, as well every one of us who has a teenage boy inside of us (oh dear, that sounds unnecessarily risque…).
It started out with Kannitha (filmmaker) proposing we take a walk after Bophana. A big group of us ended up meandering: Belle (dancer), Dara (interpreter), Nara (interpreter), Tarek (sound artist), Hu Fang (writer/curator), Manuel (choreographer), Hafiz (choreographer), Paul (observer), Sai (filmmaker) and me.
We passed the monument to independence…
… the casino (they had traditional music to mark the lucky draw)…
… and finally ended up at a rather nice Thai place where they actually quote the prices in reals instead of US dollars. (I didn’t save any money, though, ‘cos I ordered crab. Yum yum yum.)
And in between courses, Sai mentions he’s made three or four movies so far, and Manuel demands that he show us one of ’em. So he whips out his Apple Snow Leopard and we get this really cool action flick, which we end up turning around at the end of the dinner so the other side of the table can watch.
Apparently a lot of the fight sequences were coordinated by consensus decision, and the whole thing took only 15 days to film. Ah, brotherhood.
He’s tried to send the piece for festivals, but no fish have bitten yet. We all want to screen him somewhere now. (And I know it’s because of the language barrier, but the subtitles are a hoot, too.)
FCP 09/10 
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