"Crying Tigers" will be the first Thai documentary to ever be shown in theatres, and it almost didn't get released.

When Santi Taepanich's Sua Rong Hai opens in Bangkok theatres two weeks from now, it will claim the status of the first Thai documentary movie to ever get a theatrical release. And given the difficulties, heartaches and falling-outs endured by the filmmaker during the past two years, it looks likely to be the last, too.

The title is telling; Sua Rong Hai literally means "crying tigers" (its namesake also means a dish of Isan-style grilled beef). In this tragi-comic doc, four Northeastern migrants to Bangkok battle their fates like fierce tigers, only to weep their hearts out when despair and homesickness strike. Likewise, despair visited Santi, the director, when he realised that the path to making a small, unusual film like this was strewn with complications he hardly believed could ever be surmounted.

"I almost backed out so many times," says Santi, a short filmmaker and a younger brother of the famous stand-up comedian Udom "Nose" Taepanich. "My intention, of course, is to challenge myself by making a documentary that can get into the theatre, but I doubt if I'll ever do this again. I think I'll go back to making fiction films and make my life a little easier!"

Santi Taepanich

First of all, Santi's subject matter pushed him to think long and hard. His original idea was to film a doc that probed the nature of various "intriguing professions" practiced mainly by poor Isan migrants who luck it out in Bangkok: go-go girls, small-time boxers, taxi drivers, singers, cabaret dancers, watering hole comedians, and so on. His cinematic scheme was to pick samples of these people and follow them for six months to a year, using the camera to record the progress, the absurdity, and the unending drama of their struggles.

That may sound daunting, but in truth it's no match for the behind-the-lens ordeals Santi had to go through. The reason that his Crying Tigers project was backed by production house Ba-Ram-Ewe and the giant studio Sahamongkol Film two years ago was partly due to the frenzied waves of "indie fad"-the pop-cultural craze for non-mainstream products-and partly because Santi's short films, comical and crowd-pleasing, had made him a possible Next-Big-Thing.

But once sucked into the tangle of studio intrigues, the director was bitten by realities. Sure enough, he's happy to get the money to shoot his doc (around two to three million baht), but he has to compensate for that by dealing with the demands of producers and executive producers who naturally want to sell the finished product. To that end, Santi has spent the past seven months cutting and re-cutting his 300 hours of footage to show his investors a 90-minute movie. The most demoralising point was when it looked as if Crying Tigers wouldn't get a release, before Santi reworked it again and again-but even so, it's not over yet.

"When I said I wanted to make a documentary for the theatre, I meant it as a limited release; a small, semi-underground affair for audiences with real interest," says Santi. "But if they want to sell it as a mass product-like those big-budget Thai movies-then that's not exactly what I've had in mind. My film can't stand that kind of pressure. True, there are selling points in my doc, but still, it's supposed to be an independent trial."

Pornsak Songsang

Even at this minute, with the July 21 release looming, Santi was recently struck with the final blow that made him a crying tiger himself. Crying Tigers contains an episode-the movie's strongest-about the famous luk-thoong singer Pornsak Songsang. A reclusive artist, the stern-faced Pornsak allowed Santi to film him only after much pleading, and this section of the doc, told through one of the most successful Isan sons-who confesses to the camera how he misses his rural home-is a counterpoint and affirmation of Crying Tigers' theme. The problem is that Pornsak's record label has refused to let Pornsak or his songs be featured in the movie, despite the singer's consent with Santi prior to the shooting.

If negotiations do not go through, Santi will have no choice but to go back to re-edit the movie, though the director says he's already spent the last ounce of energy editing this strange baby of his.

"Don't ask me how I plan to do it," the director says smiling. "I'll think about it later. They want to release the movie, and I want to see it out too, though in what state I still don't really know."

A Bittersweet First

It's definitely crucial to the health of Thai cinema to finally have a Thai doc in the theatre, though even Santi admits that his work may not be a perfect specimen of the genre. What's most interesting in Crying Tigers is its mixture of human comedy and emotional bitterness, but Santi will have to answer the doubts of documentary purists who'll surely question his strategy of storytelling.

Crying Tigers loosely follows the lives of four Isan people who've come to Bangkok with high hopes of making it big. They're the stories of a female taxi driver, a C-grade stuntman, folk singer Pornsak Songsang, and a gay man with an oddball job: he works at a seafood restaurant on Ratchadaphisek road, and in the evening dresses up as a human fish (his colleagues become crabs, shrimp, and mussels) and tries to cajole drivers into stopping for a meal.

Initially Santi planned to chronicle 20 professions of Isan people in Bangkok, but once he started following his subjects, he realised that one person contains so many shades and angles. Thus, the filmmaker decided to pursue depth instead of width, and finally reduced the number to four.

Santi did a fine job observing the everyday humour that's steeped in buried sorrow and hopelessness, but the appearance of a "storyline", in which each of his subjects is reduced to a crying, depressing tiger at the end feels a little calculated, and thus diminishes the power you'd expect from a strong documentary. There are certain moments, too, that one feels the presence of the director hovering above the scene.

"I didn't plan the movie to come out so sad and dramatic," says Santi. "And even when people are crying, I think it could be either because they're happy or sad. When I made the doc, I was aware that I, as a director, would have to remain as objective as possible, but I admitted that sometimes I couldn't. Sure, this doc does not follow the pure essence of what a documentary should be, but then again I shot the movie without prior knowledge of how the lives of these people would turn out. And that's essentially a documentary for me.

"It was during the editing that I sensed the theme of the movie, about the homesickness, about the happy faces of these people who hide deep melancholy within. That's when I felt that I'd got my movie-not necessarily before that."

When Santi began the project, he was faced with the first hurdle he had to stumble across. "I had to find my subjects, and because there are many million Isan migrants in Bangkok, how could I know which ones would have good stories for me to tell?"

Santi prowled the streets interviewing potential subjects (luckily his cameraman can speak the Isan dialect). He dug into taxi terminals, roadside eateries, go-go bars, boxing camps, etc, and picked the people whom he believed could represent the absurd misadventures of Northeastern men in the capital. "I talked to a few hundred people, and I chose to film those whom I felt connected with," says Santi. "I ended up having so many people to film. I chose four to make this movie, but my unused footage could constitute a few more documentaries."

Perhaps the thread of story that resonates the loudest is that of Man, the guy in the fish costume who dreams of becoming a comedian. To an extent, his struggle-his willingness to bite his nails and keep on dreaming-comes close to being pathetic. But for Santi, it's called human weakness, and the director believes that the fragility of Man's life sums up the motif of his docu-drama movie.

"Yes, sometimes I felt as if I was exploiting my subjects by capturing them in a state they might not be happy to show to the camera," he says. "But I think they trusted me to do that, and I never wanted to portray them as hopeless and pitiful for dramatic effects. I believe I show it just enough to tell their stories, to present their weaknesses.

"But if you ask me, yes, that line is fuzzy, and I never know if I've stepped across it sometimes."

The issue will be decided when Crying Tigers is served up on the screen on July 21. Then it will be decided, too, if documentaries-or at least a documentary drama like this one-will have a commercial future in the staggering local movie scene.

Kong Rithdee
Bangkok Post