Towards the end of 2024, I returned to footage I had shot in 2016 while spending time with rural farmers during their harvest in Chiang Mai. These images had stayed with me for years, haunted by a phrase one farmer spoke casually: “sufficiency is insufficient”. That footage later grew into a film titled PHI PATTANA, which translates as Ghost of Development. If one lives long enough in Thailand, one begins to sense that the country is haunted by something that tightens its grip precisely when its people try to move toward a self-determined future. Through my research, this ghost gradually revealed itself as “development”. My encounter with the archival film THAILAND’S ROLE IN THE VIETNAM WAR (1967) was pivotal, as it explicitly presents development not as care, but as political strategy: a continuation of counterinsurgency by other means.
This narrative has shaped Thai society since the Cold War, most visibly through King Rama IX’s philosophy of the “sufficiency economy”. Sufficiency is not a neutral concept. It became a moral language through which obedience, restraint and national stability were defined, and through which rural life was framed and governed. Rather than empowerment, it often functioned as a way of managing inequality and narrowing what people were allowed to imagine politically. During the political crises of the 2000s, this language was violently weaponized against political opponents, culminating in the 2010 military crackdown, where protesters from rural families were killed and justice has yet to be served.1See also the film NARRATIVE by Anocha Suwichakornpong in this year’s Forum Expanded film programme. Encountering Cold War–era films, including THAILAND’S ROLE IN THE VIETNAM WAR and the Shell Film Unit’s UNITED NATIONS MEKONG RIVER PROJECT (1964), made clear how images and narratives help make such violence forgettable by presenting development as benevolence while serving military and extractive powers.
The past gathered its weight and pushed me to make this film.
In August 2024, Thailand’s military-appointed Constitutional Court dissolved a political party that had been democratically elected by the people, largely because of its stance on reforming the lèse-majesté law. What felt new was not the politics itself, but the scale of hope surrounding it: hope for solidarity, for change, for a future shaped by the people themselves. When the ruling came and the ceiling for free speech lowered once again, it felt as if the future had abruptly contracted. A familiar anxiety haunted me once again. The past gathered its weight – IN SUM – and pushed me to make this film.
Komtouch Napattaloong
