RICE dreams

A CROWD-PLEASING jubilation, Uruphong Raksasad’s award-winning “The Songs of Rice” (“Pleng Khong Kao”) is a poetic portrait of the various rituals and celebrations that accompany the cultivation of rice in Thailand.
It starts off quietly and gently, with only the sounds of chirping birds and the buzz of insects, and slowly builds up until it explodes. The sounds and tempo then gradually trail off until the movie is right back where it started.
As with Uruphong’s previous features, “Stories from the North” and “Agrarian Utopia”, genius camerawork is the highlight. Uruphong shoots the moon and then zooms back out to focus on the head of a grasshopper.
He does this a lot, showing you something pretty amazing and then turning the camera to reveal something even more astonishing. One early dramatic scene involves a Buddhist temple’s kathin procession, featuring worshippers in white parading along a rural road with a pair of elephants. The procession leads to a hilltop temple adorned by a golden stupa. If all that isn’t enough, there’s a guy riding a para-glider, flying around above it all.
“The Songs of Rice”, which won the Fipresci Award from critics at last year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, completes a trilogy for the director. “Stories from the North” was a compilation of vignettes of the director’s neighbours in his native rural Chiang Rai, while “Agrarian Utopia” followed a pair of farming families as they struggled to make ends meet while growing rice by hand on a single plot of land, just below that hilltop temple, also in Chiang Rai.
That same location in the far North is revisited in “The Songs of Rice”, but Uruphong casts his gaze further afield, filming up and and down the countryside. Places visited include Chon Buri on the Eastern Seaboard, for the water buffalo races, and in Isaan, the Northeast, the bang-fai (rocket) festival in Yasothon and a visit with the travelling families and their spacecraft-like harvesting machines in Roi Et.
The rocket festival, an annual rite in which homemade rockets are launched in a prayer for fertility and abundance, has been depicted before in such movies as Australian director Kim Mordaunt’s Lao-Issan drama “The Rocket” and Panna Rittikrai’s “Dynamite Warrior”.
But there’s another element of the festival that’s probably not as widely depicted – along with the usual bamboo and blue-PVC-pipe projectiles, there is also the spinning pinwheels that spiral into the sky. These fertiliser-fueled Frisbees are huge – one is hauled in on a six-wheel truck and placed on the launchpad with a crane. The men use long burning sticks to set off the fuse, made of old monk’s robes, and then run and jump for cover behind a mound of dirt. When the rockets work, it’s pretty dramatic and beautiful, but when they don’t work, it’s also pretty dramatic and beautiful.
Aside from the vivid images, the sound design is a highlight, bringing the thwack of whips on a buffalo to the front of the mix. The dramatic efforts of men launching rockets is underscored with their heavy steps on the rungs of the launch-platform ladders.
And is if exploding rockets aren’t enough, there’s music and dance performances to further liven things up. Cross-dressing men, likely inebriated, bang drums and play traditional instruments. A beautiful transgender person prepares a spicy somtum-and-sticky-rice feast. Steaming sticky sweet dessert is ritually prepared – mounds of it. A granny hula-hoops, teetering on the edge of a rice paddy. A rotund dancer waggles her behind to the delight of a provincial governor and other dignataries. A beauty queen rides in a golden cart pulled by water buffalo. It’s a rig that the gods could use to fly across the sky.
Communities, young and old, pull together to celebrate. In Thailand’s polarised society, “The Songs of Rice” is a healing message that gets back to the basics of stuff that really matters – traditions, culture, spirituality, food and just plain living.

SING ALONG
“The Songs of Rice” is screening at SF World Cinema at CentralWorld.
It comes to SFX Maya in Chiang Mai next Thursday and SF Cinema City in Khon Kaen on February 5.
For more details, visit www.Facebook.com/thesongsofrice