Given
Thailand’s over-the-top censorship, news that Samanrat Kanjanavanit
(a.k.a. Ing K.) and her husband/partner Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Censor Must Die was approved for exhibition this week is a strange surprise.
Last year, Kanjanavanit and Manit Sriwanichpoom’s Shakespeare Must Die became the second film to be banned under Thailand’s 2008 Film Act, which introduced an age-based ratings system
similar to the MPAA’s meant to minimize the number of banned films.
Until that point, films were evaluated on the basis of a law dating back
to 1930. The first movie banned under the new law, 2010’s Insects In The Backyard, contained what Thai blogger Wise Kwai described
as “explicit sexual imagery and allusions to patricide in the story
about the transgender father of two troubled teens,” subject matter
censors found “against public order” and “contrary to morality.”
The problems with Shakespeare were different: officially, censors feared this story of a theater troupe trying to stage Macbeth would cause “disunity.” As Wise Kwai summarizes,
the real problem was that the play company’s tyrannical leader was
“widely assumed to resemble Thailand’s ousted former prime minister
Thaksin Shinawatra,” whose sister Yingluck assumed his position by the
time the film was submitted to the censors. Out of frustration,
Kanjanavanit and Sriwanichpoom documented their attempts to overturn the
ban in the two-and-a-half hour Censor Must Die.
This week, Sriwanichpoom sent out a press release
announcing the documentary had been cleared for release. He quoted the
decision from the Department of Cultural Promotion, which stated that
the film was made “from events that really happened,” therefore making
it “exempted from the film censorship process.” As the Bangkok Post notes,
“this could be a historic ruling since it can be interpreted that from
now on, any documentary film made from ‘events that really happened’ are
not subjected to the censorship process.”
Sriwanichpoom’s release goes
on to note that “both the National Human Rights Commission and the
Senate House Human Rights Committee have concluded that the 2008 film
law should be amended” and that the former body’s recommended lifting
the ban on Shakespeare Must Die.”
This incident
is the latest in a string of controversies surrounding Thai censorship.
Earlier this year, Nontawat Numbenchapol’s documentary Boundary (regarding the Thai-Cambodia border and attendant disputes) was first banned, then unbanned, with an explanation that the ban was issued by a sub-committee without the authority to do so. (Still facing unofficial pressure, Numbenchapol was forced
to rent out auditoriums in multiplexes and sell tickets himself during
abbreviated weekend runs in some cities and only four days in Bangkok.)
Similarly, the Thai political history documentary Paradoxocracy was shown in theaters that actively tried to discourage patrons from seeing it (more on that here).
“I'm not against banning films that show, for example, child
molestation or sex with animals, which is the norm in most countries,”
acclaimed director Apichatpong Weerasethakul observed in June. “But there shouldn’t be bans based on political issues like we have here.” But with censors so sensitive they blur out the swimsuits in “Sailor Moon,” that level of free media speech is probably a ways off yet.