martin

Hours of Ours

Creates the impression that Thailand is a very uninviting place that pushes away and institutionally mistreats foreigners. This is not a characteristic of the people themselves, we see that the young members of the Ibrahim family have local friends, go to school, play and hang out, it is one of the state. It is a state that is made to make the life of foreigners as difficult as possible. Before going to Canada, after being granted asylum, the mother and father of the children have to stay in a Thai detention center for thirty days, because they lived in the country undocumented. It is a law one would expect from a country that hasn’t signed the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, a law that puts children in danger and breaks families apart, to instill in them the idea to not enter the country again. It is very clear that the kingdom does not want longterm foreign residents, only tourists. We are time and again shown that Thailand is a physically warm, but incredibly cold and alienating place. The three children are often out, mostly alone, only sometimes hanging out with friends, while the parents are always alone, even when they are out. But the latter happens very infrequently, they are afraid they will be caught and deported. We see that they exist in a state of alienation that pushes them to their limits and constantly lets them know that they are not welcomed. The Thailand we witness is a very difficult place for foreigners to live in, seemingly inviting, but in reality purposefully designed to alienate you and make you constantly remember or feel like you don’t belong there. Here I am reminded of the compulsory report to the immigration office foreigners have to make every 90 days, the intrusive law that made them report to the police when they travel and the closing of the country for all foreigners during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the director says to the mother a few times, with whom he seems to share a deep bond, Thailand is not a good place. Not only for people like her, but for people like him who’ve lived abroad. This might be the reason why they initially connect, though their care for one another is much deeper. We don’t learn how Thailand pushes away its citizens in this movie, because it is not a movie occupied with that, nor it is one about the director. It is always about the Ibrahim family, focusing on snippets of their lives in Bangkok in the room they’ve lived in for five years and have to vacate. Later, in the temporary home the three kids live in while waiting for their parents to serve their sentences for staying in Thailand, before the five can be reunited at the airport and leave for a, hopefully, better life in Canada. All these moments are photographed with the warmth of a friend and a person who cares about the Ibrahim family. In that, it is reminiscent of a family movie, and to a degree it is, Napattaloong begins shooting to create a memento of their times together. There are loving closeups of each of them, shown in warm color. The members of the family never feel like subjects of the movie, they are his collaborators, sometimes telling him what to do or not, especially the children, or asking him questions about his experience in Thailand. This creates a sense of horizontality between them. They all feel outsiders in the inhospitable land, and being together and making the movie together creates a distance between the the people in Thailand and their relationship with the family and the state. It never tries to exonerate the state, rather, it explicitly and implicitly criticizes it for the dehumanizing ways it treats everyone.