Poor Folk

Poor Folk (2012)

窮人。榴槤。麻藥。偷渡客

Arranged by a smuggling syndicate, A-Hong and his young teen sister along with a group of Burmese youngsters sneak across the Myanmar/Thailand border and arrive in a remote town called Dagudi in Northern Thailand. A-Hong's sister is taken away by the gangs as her mother has sold her to them. A-Hong goes to Bangkok and works under a tour guide, a wildcatter from Myanmar who has lived in Thailand illegally for years.

Date of release
2012-10-14
TMDB
5.0 / 10 (4)
Runtime
1h 45m
Genres
Crime, Drama
Director
Midi Z

Casting

Interesting facts

Poor Folk is the second feature movie directed by Taiwanese director Midi Z, which is packed with Return to Burma (2011) and Ice Poison (2014) by the distributor as the director's "homecoming trilogy." The trilogy depicts the lives of illegal immigrants of Chinese ethnicity on the border of Myanmar. Midi Z completed Poor Folk in the same year after Return to Burma, which grabbed international attention in many film festivals. The film presents a realistic portrayal of the life of a handful of ethnic Chinese, who try to make a living at the Thai border by drug or human trafficking.

Production

Poor Folk is based on a true story. When director Midi Z went to Thailand in 2008, he met a friend who had illegally crossed the border from Myanmar to Thailand. After arriving in Thailand, the friend's sister went missing and he had been searching for her. Eventually, he became addicted to drugs and lost his mind. The film is partially autobiographical. Midi Z also grew up in Myanmar and could easily cross the border to Thailand or China.

To meet director Midi Z's requirements for realism in the film, the male lead, Wang Shin-Hong, lived in Bangkok for several months and the female lead, Wu Ke-Xi, lived on the Myanmar border for two months before shooting. To get close to the character, she got tanned and learned to do housework as an underclass worker of the lower class.

Both Poor Folk and Return to Burma used the Thai-Myanmar border as an important filming location, where some Thai and Myanmar resistance forces were stationed at that time. Faced with such a filming environment, Midi Z chose to use a small camera as filming equipment and studied it repeatedly to minimize the impact of lighting on the film.

When filming the border scenes, the crew had to negotiate with the military guards and faced unexpected difficulties due to the particular location. In one scene, Wang Shin-Hong had to walk through an area filled with tall grass on the border. For example, after the director had the desired shot and called “cut!” Wang Shin-Hong was nowhere to be found.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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