Farmers are filmed growing rice in an idyllic setting, prodded to discuss the changing world. Is it a documentary?
Is it a documentary, fiction, or both? Bangkokians will get to decide in September.
People attending the the Berlin Documentary Forum earlier this month got to see how it fit into the festival's theme, "New Practices Across Disciplines".
Uruphong follows two landless and struggling farming families in Chiang Rai for a year, the beauty and serenity of their surroundings contrasting with the country's political, economic and social turbulence.
Unlike most documentary films, "Agrarian Utopia" has no interviews or narrator, and Uruphong had no script when be undertook the project in 2007.
"I only knew it was going to be about rice farmers over the course of a year," he says. "I myself didn't know how it would turn out until I was in the cutting room."
The movie can't help but feel authentic with actual farmers as the stars. The director rented land and hired them to grow rice there. "Everything they say is their own words," Uruphong says. "I only gave them hints in terms of the topics."
Is it still a "documentary", or did his coaching make it fiction? Uruphong believes it's both.
The Berlin audience debated the point, but certainly agreed it's a gorgeous movie. Most viewers were stunned at the beauty of the golden rice field, so much so that Uruphong had to swear he'd relied entirely on a single high-definition video camera, with no post-production.
Influenced by Terrence Malick, the American director of "Days of Heaven" and "The Thin Red Line", Uruphong noted that the sumptuous setting was a tool in capturing the stark contrast between reality and utopia.
"The rice field and the process of growing rice are very beautiful, like paradise, but at the same time it's not a sustainable practice in reality."
He also pointed out the film's autobiographical nature - he's a farmer's son from Chiang Rai and grew up running through muddy paddies and riding buffalo.
Not since the 1980s has a movie taken the subject of farmers seriously, Uruphong says. All recent depictions have seen them as silly or backward. He wanted to give them due respect.
"Utopia" has won several prizes, including the Unesco trophy at last year's Asia-Pacific Screen Awards, for "promoting and preserving cultural diversity through film".
Last weekend, the movie won a special jury award at the Millennium International Documentary Film Festival in Brussels.
Uruphong has screened it from Rotterdam, Vancouver and New York to Istanbul and Brisbane, Australia.
The world tour, Uruphong says, has been both educational and a boost for his confidence.
"I imagined these places a certain way, but now that I've seen them, I understand the world better. I've become more confident in the way I see it, but at the same time I'll never forget who I am and where I'm from."
He discovered that documentary filmmakers around the globe share the problem of a limited market for their work, through Europeans are more enthusiastic about the genre, far more so than Thais.
Documentaries are routinely screened at European film festivals and then released to cinemas, cable and public TV, and often as DVDs, with distribution rights sold around the continent.
"It means directors have more chances to make money from a film," Uruphong says. "In Thailand you're most likely to go from the film festival directly to DVD, and in limited quantity."
He is undeterred, regardless.
"You have to know yourself and do what you love to do, what you're good at, and keep doing it. As long as you have a passion and do your best, you'll be able to create great work."
COMING SOON
- "Sawan Baan Na" is scheduled for a limited theatrical run in Bangkok in September at SFX the Emporium.
- Uruphong Raksasad earned his bachelor's degree from Thammasat University, majoring in documentary film. He left a job in the mainstream entertainment industry to tell the stories of "small", neglected people.
- His 2006 debut movie, "Stories from the North", strung together "eight and a half" portrayals of rice farmers in his home province.
- For "Agrarian Utopia", Uruphong received money from the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund and the Thai Culture Ministry's Office of Contemporary Arts and Culture.