It was only when the director shared that he too had lost a parent at age 10, like Ahlo, that Kai started to "talk about his losses" and to reveal emotion. "I thought, this guy is never going to open up because he's learned to protect himself on the street. At first Mordaunt "couldn't get to the core of his emotions," he recalled. That Ki's performance would be so raw wasn't apparent from the outset of his new acting gig.
Played by former street urchin Sitthiphon "Ki" Disamoe, Ahlo blends pathos and pluck with such naturalism it's sure to leave a nick. An especially lyrical example is Ahlo's friendship with Kia (Loungnam Kaosainam), which begins as the 9-year-old orphan literally rains down purple flowers on him from her perch in a tree.īoth fledglings revel in adventure while allowing audiences a close view of tender sorrows. Mordaunt is making a statement, but his bully pulpit is adorned with blossoms. This makes The Rocket a far more cheerful experience than its war-torn landscape and unkindly taboos might suggest. Happily, though, Mordaunt resists all temptation to preach. The Rocket, like its young hero, is out to reverse a curse. Lamenting that developers are currently planning 52 dams across Laos, he stated, "That's really why I made the film - I could see what was happening in Laos and elsewhere in Asia." "Australia does a lot of ethical business in Asia, but a lot of unethical business as well," he told me. With his fiction debut, the Australian writer-director now takes aim at Australia's dealings that he believes threaten to destroy indigenous Asian traditions and resources. Shot in a real hydroelectic lake, this haunting sequence anticipates the literal and figurative submerging of local culture, or what Mordaunt described as the "ghosting of their traditions by this Australian-Lao dam."īehind this saga of dislocation lurk digs at today's economic aggression and its eerie echoes of the American strafings that drove a million Laotian peasants from their homes during the Vietnam War. Mordaunt probed the lingering fallout from that campaign in his 2007 documentary Bomb Harvest. "It's a foreboding of what was about to happen to this ancient community and also what was going to happen to his mother," explained Mordaunt.
One of the most memorable scenes in The Rocket plunges us underwater as Ahlo discovers buddha heads, wat ruins and sundry village detruitus that have sunken with the dam project. To overcome his jinx, Ahlo sets his eyes on the prize at the Rocket Festival. This rambunctious Spring ceremony, rooted in a traditional phallic rite, entails firing rockets at the sky deities to bring on the rainy season. Ahlo is held culpable for his family's accruing misfortunes as they're forced off their land to make way for the construction of hydro-electric dams by an Australian corporation. The Laotian-Australian production centers on 10-year-old Ahlo, an artful operator who is born under a bad omen as a twin.
#Hero academy cluster bomb full#
Laos's beauty and bête noire are on full view in Kim Mordaunt's redemptive tale, The Rocket. Palm fronds swaying in the breeze, moon-lit mountains, petal-strewn altars: Laos may be the most paradisical place on Earth. But this paradise harbors a darker superlative: At nearly 80 million cluster bombs (minus the 500,000 that have been cleared), it's the most bombarded country per capita in history.