China will need a houseboat for "Teacher's Diary"

It and Part 5 of “The Legend of King Naresuan” are the only Thai movies that topped Bt100 million at the box office so far this year. We figure everyone will love it, so we’ve sent it off to Hollywood as Thailand’s candidate for the Best Foreign-language Oscar.
And we cannot be wrong, because now there’s going to be a Chinese version of “Teacher’s Diary”, and you know what they say – 1.4 billion people in China can’t be wrong.
Interestingly, the Mandarin edition is going to be a co-production between South Korea’s Film Line Pictures Production and Malaysia’s Prodigee Media. They announced plans for the remake at the recent Busan International Film Festival and are aiming for a 2016 release.
So Nithiwat Tharatorn, who directed the original, is now wearing three feathers in his cap –box-office hit, Oscar bid and the waiting Chinese masses. (If he happens to win the Oscar he’ll be able to build a whole bird.) Also cheering from the sidelines are his “Teacher” stars, Sukrit “Bie” Wisetkaew, who played Khru Song, and Chermarn Bunyasak, who was Khru Ann.
Evidently the South Koreans and Malaysians want to actually set the story in China, which certainly has many atmospheric locations for a lonely old school houseboat. Nithiwat has been told there’s no such thing floating around China, though, as hard as that is to believe. He’s keen to see what they come up with anyway, and he’s sure they’ll find a gorgeous location to fit the story (no, not the Three Gorges Dam).
He hopefully envisions something like “Not One Less” or “The Road Home” by acclaimed director Zhang Yimou. “Not One Less” is about a 13-year-old girl who’s picked to be the substitute teacher in her remote mountain village when the regular teacher has to take a month’s leave. She’s promised extra pay if she doesn’t “lose” any students in the interim, so when a young pupil takes off to the city, she goes after him to drag him back.
“The Road Home” also takes advantage of China’s multitude of lovely rustic settings. A young teacher assigned to a village falls in love with a local girl – the character that made Zhang Ziyi a star.
You can’t blame Nithiwat, then, for imaging an actress who looks like Zhang Ziyi playing Khru Ann in the remake of his movie. “She’s my favourite actress,” he admits. (Oops, sorry, Chermarn.) It won’t be Zhang Ziyi in the remake, of course, because she’s no longer a “girl” – she’s 35.
The remake looks to be a truly pan-Asian project, with Korean Kim Tai-sik and Malaysian Fred Chong co-directing and the script coming from Chinese screenwriter Shu Huan, who wrote the loveable Chinese blockbuster “Lost in Thailand”.
Kim is the founder of Film Lines Picture and Chong started Prodigee. Kim worked in Japan, Australia and Hong Kong before returning home to make his critically acclaimed directorial debut with “Driving with My Wife’s Lover” in 2007. Chong’s Prodigee started out as a music firm, expanded into multimedia and then, in 2011, jumped into cinema.