THAI

VOICES on The Impossible

Exclusive comments from Thai community development professionals on memory, loss, traditional knowledge, and disaster preparedness. January 2013 Pojanee I cried when the movie began until it ended. The movie is great. I was deeply sad with the unfortunate situation the family faced and I believe that the film fulfills the producers purpose very well. I could feel the violence and understand how many people died in the tsunami. Even though Thailand is largely healed from the disaster, I think we still need to focus on disaster management. Boonyawee It's a good movie to show how the tourists felt and what happened to them at the time of the tsunami. It's very sad for so many people to lose their friends, family, etc. In my opinion, few Thais are shown in the film, while in reality, there were many Thai workers and volunteers, including doctors, students, nurses, officials who tried to help people in this disaster. Not only foreigners were lost; many Thais died and Thai survivors lost family and also their homes. Santi I admire the director and filmmakers in that they choose not to tell a story of a hero in a disaster like a conventional action/disaster movie, but instead told a story of human beings who are so scared, not knowing how to cope with such a large force of nature, but having such strong human faith that their families will be alive. I had the opportunity to witness the scene after the wave, and the films technique, production, and setting are so real it shows that the crew really did a lot of homework. I like in particular the scene in the hospital where it was chaos but very respectful of the response. Myself, I have no problem that the film chooses to portray only one family with Thai people as a background. Viewed though the filmmakers eyes, there are only so many aspects of the event and so many actors, Thai or foreign, that can be

told in one story without making the film lose its focus. The tagline of the film focuses on the moment when it was impossible to know whether your loved ones are alive or dead. Such experience can happen to any nationalities. One aspect that Id like the filmmaker to explore is to go beyond the tsunami event as it happened on Dec 26 (the waves, the victim, the chaos), to the philosophical question about nature, disaster, and its relationship to the human beings on the earth. For the tsunami, people said there is no one to blame because the event was unpredictable and the scope was too large for humans to cope with. However, there are so many natural disasters every year, and their severity is increasing. It would be good to have a film that can make people leave the theatre questioning whether human behavior does to some extent contribute to the acceleration of such disasters. Suntaree I would like to see more scenes of Thai people and the local culture, as it seems like this tragedy didnt even take place in Thailand. And, I would like to add a broader range of feelings of people affected by the tsunami. Tsunamis have never happened in Thailand before. People just did not know what the warning signs were and what to do next. This was in contrast to the tribal group called the Morgan, who live in the southern Surin islands in Phang Nga Province. With their traditional knowledge handed down from their sea-roaming forefathers, the Morgan villagers were able to detect the first signs of receding water and take refuge in the hills without any loss of life. It has been proven that even 10 minutes advance warning saves lives, and since 2004 Thailand has called for more transfer of technology and capacity- building on disaster monitoring and assessment. Natthaphol The film gave me mixed feelings of love, loss, help, family and fear from natural disaster. Even though there were not many Thai in the film, the film presented them well in terms of their helping without asking for something in return. And, I think Thailand recovered quickly because we helped each other and right now we need more tourists to visit Thailand.

www.TsunamiPlus10.org Also see: Beyond the Impossible: A Viewers Guide to the 2004 Tsunami and Lessons for Today.