'Rocket' wins despite its unguided missile

“The Rocket” was declared Best First Feature and won the Crystal Bear and the Amnesty International prize at the Berlin fest. It also took the top Narrative Feature and Audience prizes at New York’s Tribeca festival, and its hero, former street waif Sitthiphon “Ki” Disamoe, was named best actor. And he’s due to pick up best-actor honours at the City Film Festival in Sydney next month.
Hopefully he still will, but meanwhile he had the movie’s publicists and his family frantically searching for him after he went missing on May 17.
It wasn’t the first time Ki had disappeared from home, either. Last year he took off to Pattaya with a teenage cousin before finally returning home after a month. So his mother Raweeporn didn’t bother calling the cops this time until the movie’s executive producer, Triphet Rookachat, launched an appeal on Facebook. Modernine’s “Bok Lao Kao Sib” followed suit last Wednesday, and that finally turned up Ki the same evening, in an Internet cafe in Bangkok’s Ramkhamhaeng area. He was fine – just worn out from playing computer games for days and nights on end with two other cousins.
Ki’s unlikely rise to stardom began on the mean streets, selling sweets and begging. His father died when he was very young and the family is poor. One day he went into a shop to cadge coins from a woman who happened to work as an extra in films. She introduced him to casting director Raweeporn Jungmeier, and Ki was signed to play Ahlo, a boy with a supposed walking curse, blamed for a string of disasters.
Then Ahlo meets a spirited orphan and her eccentric Uncle Purple, played by famed comedian Thep Pho-ngam. They set out on a mission to prove that Ki isn’t cursed – by building a giant firework that might just win top prize at the Rocket Festival.
Let’s hope Ki sticks around when the movie premieres in Thailand late this year.