Every once in a while (though not too often!) while watching a film I feel strangely elevated, aware that I am in on something extraordinary – though that it may take some time to understand what I am looking at. My heart and mind are frantically reaching for connections to help bits and pieces fall into place and to start forming an integrated story.

This definitely happened to me while watching Thai writer-director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s first feature film Manta Ray from 2018. My acquaintance with the films of his more well-known fellow country man Apichatpong Weerasethekul helped me settle into the cinematic language he uses and into the unexplained transformations of reality that make the story less linear than we are used to. With its spellbinding visual language, its intriguing sounds, its sparse dialogue and its moving, political storytelling I personally crown it as one of my richest film experiences of this year. This director is someone to look out for in the future!

In the introduction Manta Ray starts with a dedication to the Roningya’s, a stateless people in north-western Myanmar, suffering horrific persecution, nowadays living exiled in neighbouring states and around the world. Since the early 1990s over a million refugees have fled violence in Myanmar in different waves of displacement.

Next in the opening scene we see armed men roam a coastal woodland to hunt down and kill the refugees they find, dumping them into hastily dug graves. In the next scene we see a young, blond-haired fisherman, while looking for special colored stones in the swamps, stumble over the body of a wounded, dying refugee there. He brings him home, takes care of his wounds, nurtures him to health. This wounded man happens to be mute, so it takes almost 10 minutes before the first words are spoken, pointing at the powerlessness and loneliness experienced by the Roningya’s.

The fisherman, whose wife has left him, offers friendship to the refugee, taking him in, caring for him, providing him with medicine, taking him to places of peace and beauty, teaching him to swim, how to find and collect precious stones. It leads him to informing his boss on the fishing boat that he will not participate anymore in the activity of rounding up refugees. Shortly afterwards he does not come back from a fishing tour. From that moment on the refugee takes more and more the identity of the fisherman, whose fate he deeply mourns. He revisits the places the fisherman has shown him. He starts to work in his place as a fisherman. He colors his hair so that it resembles the hair of the fisherman. And when the fisherman’s wife comes back, he moves into the role of her husband.

And then we move into the final part and back into the forest, full of dead Rohingya bodies without identity, inhabited by their spirits and memories. And we may get a feel of how hard it is to find a new identity for those who are displaced, how history catches up and keeps haunting. And we see the manta ray glide into the water as the symbol of the migrant: ”It’s a creature that swims around all waters and doesn’t belong anywhere. It has no concept of borders.”

A film to be seen, heard and felt!

Rinus, Nov 2020

*image (© Phuttiphong Aroonpheng) & trailer posted for non commercial purposes under ‘fair use’ of copyright material in recommendation of the film