Ong-art Ponethon

A historical drama set in the 1930s Isan province Thailand, telling the travails of a small clan of subsistence farmers and their village as a particularly bad drought reduces them to bush living.

Tongpan is a 1977 Thai 16 mm black-and-white docudrama that re-creates a seminar that took place in Northeast Thailand in 1975 to discuss the proposed Pa-Mong Dam on the Mekong. Interwoven are sequences depicting a poor farmer, Tongpan, who had lost his land to another dam some years before, and his struggles to make ends meet.