THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
nationthailand

Humanising the HANGMAN

Humanising the HANGMAN

FILMMAKER BOO JUNFENG TAKES ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN “APPRENTICE” WITH CHARACTERS THAT INSPIRE EMPATHY IN VIEWERS.

CAPITAL punishment is dehumanising. That was the topic of a debate film-maker Boo Junfeng took part in as a student at Chung Cheng High School.
“I didn’t even understand what dehumanising meant. Even with the definition in the dictionary, it felt a bit abstract,” he says, recalling that he was on the team proposing the motion.
“I remember losing the debate,” he adds with a laugh.
The research he did on the topic - lethal injection, electric chair, wrongful convictions - stayed with him. “When I became older, when my world view broadened and I understood things more deeply, that’s when I started to take notice of the discussions that were happening here.”
His second feature, “Apprentice”, is about a young prison officer, Aiman (Fir Rahman), who gets taken under the wing of prison executioner Rahim (Wan Hanafi Su).
Aiman’s sister, Suhaila (Mastura Ahmad), frowns on the apprenticeship of her brother, who has personal reasons for wanting to get closer to the executioner.
I’ve always believed that through story telling, through film, when we are able to humanise characters and make them relatable, these topics no longer remain just topics. They become human experiences with the potential of inspiring empathy.
The film, which premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, opened yesterday at selected Bangkok theatres.
While Boo, 32, is personally against the death penalty, which is carried out in Singapore, he is wary of having “Apprentice” seen as an issues movie.
The soft-spoken filmmaker, whose debut feature “Sandcastle” (2010) dug into the once-taboo topic of leftist Chinese student activism in the 1950s, says: “Sometimes, topics may seem contentious and difficult to deal with, but I’ve always believed that through story- telling, through film, when we are able to humanise characters and make them relatable, these topics no longer remain just topics.
“They become human experiences with the potential of inspiring empathy. The world could use a bit more empathy.”
The desire to come up with flesh- and-blood characters meant that the writing process took time.
Describing an early draft of Rahim as “essentially a caricature”, Boo says: “In order for the story to work, since I was trying to explore the human psyche of this profession, I needed to understand this character as a human being.”
So he put the word out through friends and eventually managed to speak to two retired executioners. While he already had a specific character in mind, one with motivations and principles, “meeting these two men helped me humanise” the role.
He even had afternoon tea with one of them and his family at his home and realised “they are no different from any everyday uncle”, and that helped him to see Rahim as a person who is relatable.
Apprentice, rated 15+ in Thailand, has an ending left open to interpretation.
But Boo says he was not under pressure to nudge the film in a certain direction despite the thorny subject of capital punishment.
“The way the film ends was in my very first pitch to my producer. Three years of writing and developing and another year of editing the film were all working towards being able to end the film this way.
“It needs to be thrown back at the audience, for people to contemplate it a little further.”
The feedback he has received so far has been positive: “People have told me that the film stays with them.”
Casting was also a key process and it took about a year. A little unusually, he wrote the characters without specific ethnicities in mind and held colour-blind auditions.
“It didn’t matter so much what the actors’ race was going to be and what language they were going to speak. For me, what was more important was widening the talent pool.”
And so he reached out to anyone who was of the right age and physique, regardless of whether they were professional or non-professional actors. He had a lucky break when it came to Malaysian actor Wan Hanafi. Boo had picked up a bunch of films from a DVD shop in Kuala Lumpur and binge-watched them in a hotel.
The movies included the thriller, “Bunohan” (2012), by director Dain Said. “I saw this beautiful-looking old man with white long hair and I was like, ‘Him! Who is he?’
“What I really liked about Wan Hanafi was how unpredictable he was and, at the same time, the gravitas he naturally had has helped to anchor the film.”
As for Fir, he was just starting out then and has since become more known on Suria channel and in the theatre scene.
Boo says of him: “There was something very quietly intense about him that I felt was very suitable for Aiman.”
The chemistry between Wan Hanafi and Fir worked as well. Boo points out that their characters naturally speak in Malay and so he roped in home-grown playwright- director Irfan Kasban to work on the translation of the script.
While Boo was a little apprehensive at first about the Malay dialogue, given that he does not speak the language, he found out that the intonations were familiar, thanks to similarities in Singlish.
Irfan also served as interpreter and language consultant on the set.
The bigger challenge was that the scale of “Apprentice” is much larger than that of the family drama Sandcastle.
Filming was done on location in New South Wales, Australia, at two decommissioned prisons – Maitland Gaol and Parramatta Correctional Centre.
Boo’s hope is for as many people to watch the film as possible and that there will be strong word-of-mouth for it.
“I will continue to make films with themes that matter to me. I found it very interesting to be working with big themes, but making them personal and intimate. That’s one of the most important things about making the films I make,” he says.

 

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