The sense of menace builds as the film tracks behind the lone girl carrying a bucket down a dark forest trail, broken by a rustle among the trees and the surreal appearance of a one-eyed boy who mimes for her to stay silent. Is she seeing this and his subsequent abduction or possible murder by an improbably strange looking couple in a silver car or did she imagine it? Why does she not mention what has profoundly disturbed her when she is reunited with her family later in the same scene?

The film echoes a parallel experience in the life of Shin whose Korean parents moved to the Niagara Falls area of Canada when he was a young child. Like Abby in the film, Shin believes he may have witnessed a kidnapping as a child but is aware how memory can distort an experience over time.

Abby, played by British actor Tuppence Middleton, now a nervy 32-years-old, is seen returning to the down at heel town of her youth in the aftermath of her mother’s death. She wants to thwart the disposal of the seedy Rainbow Hill Motel owned by her family, which is about to be sold off to the local property speculator Charles Lamb and camps out on the site.

Tension with her sister is clearly riding high especially when she ropes her brother-in-law in to report the 25-year-old abduction to the local police force, only to be interviewed by a rookie cop she had attempted to seduce the night before. Already having her marked down as a fantasist, after she improbably claims to be a virgin and then immediately contradicts herself, the cop refuses to take her seriously.

Abby then begins to try and unravel the mystery herself and as she does so the plot becomes entwined with a series of larger than life characters: a husband; a wife; celebrity duo The Magnificent Moulins, whose magic act involves a tiger in a cage, and who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of a Stan Lee graphic novel along with their shadowy female assistant who bears an alarming resemblance to the woman Abby remembers from the abduction. And what did happen to the Moulins’ son? Returning to the scene of the crime she sees a deep-sea diver emerge from the water at the very spot where her fish was reeled in 25 years earlier.

This is 77-year-old Walter, played by film director, David Cronenburg. Walter is the last surviving member of a family known as the Diving Bells whose hobby is scouring the waters of the gorge for detritus ranging from wedding rings to corpses. In the past he also went fishing for clues about the missing Moulin boy but the police department has dismissed him as a conspiracy theorising podcasting ‘wacko’.

The film shot exclusively in Niagara Falls town (on the Canadian side) is portrayed as a seedy cross between Vegas and Atlantic City and includes scenes in an existing UFO themed restaurant in the town centre where Walter records his podcasts – ironically reflecting the sci-fi themes of many of Cronenburg’s own films. In this, as in so many other ways, there are cross-overs between drama and real life and the film curiously evokes echoes of Mulholland Drive as some of the dark themes merge into the unsettling and unbelievable.

Middleton plays a strong central lead, at one time focused and sure of herself at other times hopelessly at sea and clearly psychologically troubled. Other characters are less well developed or presented by the writers, Shin and James Schultz, as deliberate caricatures, though the character of Walter gives Cronenburg some interesting scenes on the other side of the camera.

Inconsistent in places with a tangled theme, which becomes increasingly bizarre, this is nonetheless a film worthy of a viewing. The strong soundtrack composed by Alexander Sowinski and Leland Whitty adds effectively to the sense of menace and uncertainty that pervades the film. Do not expect a neat ending – just an intriguing one.

Disappearance At Clifton Hill will be available on Digital Download from 20 July and on DVD from 3 August 2020.

Directed by Albert Shin
Written by Albert Shin and James Schultz
Soundtrack Alexander Sowinski & Leland Whitty
Starring Tuppence Middleton, Hannah Gross and Marie-Josée Croze, David Cronenburg

Running time 1 hour, 40 minutes

The post Disappearance At Clifton Hill: Film Review appeared first on Quays Life.

I first met the Moradokmai Theatre Community from Thailand at a Nepalese theatre festival in 2008. The Community was one of the largest groups attending, and they reminded me of a travelling circus, ranging in age from 8 to 50-years-old. Many shivered in the Himalayan chill of early morning as, despite their locally bought woollen helmets, they were dressed for warmer climes.

Chang, the Director and charismatic father figure of the company, sported a thin grey beard, which reached half-way down his chest and long hair, tied back in a pigtail. His sense of humour was infectious and I was drawn to him and Pobchan, his much younger wife whose serene features exuded a Buddha-like calm. Chang, I discovered, was a celebrity in Thailand, well known for his extensive film career. A dynamic jazz musician and actor, he had studied music in America. Both he and Pobchan spoke excellent English though the rest of the company had just a few halting words. We hit it off immediately.

My company of English actors had witnessed the early rising habits of Moradokmai who took over the fourth-floor dinning room of our hotel at 5.30 am every morning where they lit candles to welcome the dawn and conducted a Buddhist ceremony accompanied by drums and a Thai xylophone, before embarking on a strenuous rehearsal which lasted til the rest of the international thespians, rather bleary-eyed from the previous late night theatre and after-show drinking, joined them for breakfast at 8am. They intrigued me. When Chang asked me to go and direct for them I took up the challenge. This was the beginning of a long and creative friendship.

Some 20 years ago Chang moved his acting company out of Bangkok to establish a home school in Klong Luang Patumthani, a rural region 47 kms north of Bangkok. Here his actors and young students could live and learn together, in a self-sufficient community, growing their own food and creating a base for the study of traditional Thai dance music and performance, while welcoming international artists to come and share their skills and experience.

International festivals at Patumthani brought artists from all over the world. The 2010 festival alone, the first years I visited them, featured performers from India, Romania, Germany, Netherlands, Indonesia, Uganda, Nepal, Russia, Estonia, and Slovenia. The 2011 festival also featured artists from France, America and Cambodia.

My first production for the company was Caucasian Chalk Circle. We rehearsed and performed in an open-air circular arena under a black scrim awning looking out over a groove of banana trees and rice fields. Pobchan translated the play into Thai and I worked from a script where both languages sat side-by-side, so we were literally always on the same page.

I introduced the script only gradually as the actors became more and more familiar with the story line, and after many scene-by-scene discussions on character motivations and the underlying theme of the play. I have now directed for the company a number of times using this technique. This January 2020 marked my fifth visit after an absence of several years.

In additional to international links, the company has a schools’ network throughout Thailand, where their actors teach dance and drama and invite the schools to perform at their home base. They also work in prisons and probation centres. In 2013, I worked for them at a probation centre in Songkhla province where we dramatised a short story that had won a South East Asia writers award. The play was then performed with two other adaptations compiled by a Spanish and Nepalese director – the trio entitled, “Thai stories through the eyes of outsiders”. Subsequently my play was performed all over Thailand.

The company travel extensively. In 2012 they came to England for the Contacting the World festival and a subsequent tour. They have extensive links in Eastern Europe where their students have gone to study in a different musical tradition.

Future tours are now dependent on the control of the pandemic – fortuitously as it turned out, I managed a month with them this January getting back well before lockdown. This latest challenge was to create a performance from a play written by a Thai playwright who had attended a playwriting course at Moradokmai. The play, Guiding Ghosts, was about a generational struggle between two brothers over ancestral traditions.

Thai does not translate easily into English and my first task was to unravel the meaning of the play. I worked extensively on the script with the playwright, who is head of the faculty of Film and TV at Rangsit University. This was a skill sharing exercise to keep the play true to its conception but utilising what I could bring from a western theatre tradition.

Working with actors who live together is fascinating. Because they know each other so well (some younger actors were born here from acting parents) their responses are instinctive. Once they have understood the nature of the play the speed at which they create their performance is exceptional. While progress is slower with some of the younger members of the cast, I never ceased to be impressed with their skills and hard work.

I have learned from working at Moradokmai to expect the unexpected, never make assumptions and be endlessly adaptable. Over the course of 27 days, I had a series of cast changes and lulls between rehearsals when the actors were performing elsewhere or assisting at a massive three day music festival, a huge Guru theatre blessing ceremony, two Thai weddings of company members and preparations for a major American tour which was to be cut short by the pandemic.

They also busk in the night markets several times a week; a surprisingly successful funding stream for the company, which I guess, is also temporarily curtailed. We travelled to Rangsit University to perform the play to film students and to Korat to perform in their open-air theatre space. (The company also has land in Loei province and Chang Rai.) I also recorded the whole play in English in their sound studio.

I take back memories of their beautiful new traditional performance space looking out over a large lake where the geese woke me with their loud honking every morning; the flotilla of little ducks clucking their way down the banana grove en-route to gain scraps from the kitchen; performing under the trees to the noise of bird song; the sound of the Thai xylophone being practised over and over again; endless performances to watch and comment on; the company’s quirky new tap dancing skills, and hearing the beat of the drums at 5 am when the community start their day.

Much has changed from the early days when Chang and his family lived in a mud hut by the side of a lake and I lived in a series of rotting cabins besieged by mosquitoes, frogs and once a poisonous black centipede, and woken daily at 3 am by a cockerel.

This year I lived in an adapted container with air con – a huge upgrade, and the company is now building a black box theatre, has new dormitories and a sound studio. “Give me a couple of years and I will build you a permanent house,” said Chang before I left. Pandemic willing I intend to take him up on the offer.

Read our interview with author Alex Wheatle

The post Drama By The Rice Fields: Working With The Moradokmai Theatre Community appeared first on Quays Life.