Doi Boy: largely compelling contemporary Far Eastern drama with sound mix of personal and political

https://youtu.be/sJdJfTsJ7U0

An effective drama with a number of interesting and contemporary strands - civil war and compulsory military service, people trafficking, police and law enforcement corruption, work in the sex services industry (not as significant as the trailer implies) and the difficulty of finding a good life to lead when most of the odds are stacked against you.

What it reveals is how painfully easy it is to get pulled into a dark and dangerous netherworld that is very difficult if not impossible to get out of.. Certainly, in the latter part of the film I was much more emotionally involved in the stories than I was at the start. And stories it was, as there were three central characters who connected and separated throughout the drama. But something this film did was to show how many other people were and are affected by the issues, particularly people trafficking and the disappearance of many, A strength of the film was how it showed this aspect of the stories, putting them in a larger context and making it clear that the individual stories were were following were only the tip of a massive iceberg and endemic to the society.

the director apparently made his name with documentaries and his ability to see individual stories and put them in a larger context was a major strength of the film.

However I did feel that structurally the film was weak as the tracking of the overlapping storylines was frequently muddled and unclear, leaping from one to the other. the ending was rapid - and dark. I felt more could have been made of it and in this respect, and the structural point made earlier, meant that for me the film was something of a detailed sketch but not a quite yet completed painting. But a good and involving film nevertheless, in spite of these flaws.

Searching: : ‘Missing teen’ drama whose method of telling the story is considerably more interesting than the story per se

Pain Hustlers: Unusually intriguing and successful multi-genre mix of black comedy, personal dramas and thought-provoking expose documentary .