Jason Telles

In his fictional documentary Agrarian Utopia (Sawan Baan Na, TH 2009), Thai director Uruphong Raksasad relinquishes narrative control to the camera, which captures a diversity of human and nonhuman lives in their interaction and interdependency with the material world. Focusing on a group of hired, lowly paid rice farmers and their survival-driven interaction with the land, the camera follows them to the rice fields, their family and homes, a Buddhist statue, the political and urban realms of the nation, and a retired teacher who dreams of a sustainable agricultural utopia. Intersecting their daily struggles for food, livelihood, and a better future for their children, a pattern of ritually contained, ideologically legitimized pilfering is repeating itself from the politicians’ invocation of national progress and landlords’ pursuit of wealth down to the landless farmers trying to soothe their hunger and the nonhuman protagonists’ victimization. By relating these struggles toward each other before the background of the 2009 economic and political turbulence, the film deconstructs the Thai version of the Agrarian Myth and its role as cornerstone of an imagined national identity. The perspective of the films’ narration is embedded in nature, with even the camera itself often being materially exposed to natural elements and to the ecosystem surrounding it. We argue that this holistic approach to filmmaking presents a practice of cinematic ecology as a form of intersectional critique; as such, it is concerned with the critical exploration of our human/nonhuman entanglements, including the trans-/local configuration of ordering institutions and their inherent power structures. The resulting aesthetic of nondominance sheds light on the relations and interactions between human and nonhuman beings as well as cinema—as art, narrative system, and industry alike—and the world.