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Published on August 6, 2007

Pimpaka Towira was just making the final cuts to her film about Supinya Klangnarong's David-and-Goliath fight with Shin Corp when the coup pulled the rug out from under her.

"The Truth Be Told" - whose premiere will open the Digital Forum segment of the Thai Film Foundation's short-film festival on September 6 - was never intended as a political movie. It was a documentary about a gutsy woman who took on big business and ended up a heroine to many believers, both in Thailand and overseas.

Supinya's victory over the mighty corporation founded by Thaksin Shinawatra - the company sued her and the Thai Post newspaper for a crippling Bt400 million for saying it had benefited from his premiership - seemed to be a victory for democracy.

But when the tanks rolled last September and Thaksin was flung from power, democracy's knees buckled and Pimpaka didn't know which way to turn.

"The coup changed the whole movie, and it also changed my way of thinking," she says.

Pimpaka met Supinya in 2004 when they jointly represented Thailand at a news-media forum in Singapore.

Learning about the court case and finding Supinya's character "interesting" - as well as her role as an ordinary woman yanked into the limelight - Pimpaka proposed making the documentary.

"In the movie I never look at Kay as an activist," she says, using Supinya's nickname. "I focus on her as an individual who has a life beyond politics. I filmed her as a fellow female, not an activist. But certainly I touch on the issue of freedom of expression because that's what caused her all the trouble."

Pimpaka also shot footage of anti-Thaksin rallies, interviewing many of the participants. Politics inevitably played a lead role in the film, as it did in Supinya's life, but Pimpaka insists that she didn't set out to make a political statement.

"I look at her life, and there were political elements and the issue of freedom of expression, but that's not the focus of the film. I capture a lot of her ordinary life."

Pimpaka recalls the first time she accompanied Supinya to court and found only a few people taking an interest in the case. "All I saw during the very first times at the court were a few newspaper journalists," she says. "There were no broadcast journalists. The case didn't get much attention until it became high-profile."

By the time the verdict was handed down on March 15, 2006, everything had changed utterly. There was a big crowd of TV reporters as well as many cheering supporters. And Pimpaka had the perfect ending to her movie.

She had finished almost 70 per cent of the editing when Thailand was rocked by a military uprising of the sort it never expected to see again.

The September 19 coup raised a slew of fresh, challenging questions for Pimpaka. Democracy, as embodied in Supinya's freedom-of-speech court triumph, appeared suddenly pointless.

The director asked herself whether Thaksin was any different from others in power, whether the masses had been used, and whether Supinya had also been used.

The answers she settled on became part of the film, along with the clanking of tank treads on pavement, but Pimpaka refused to lose sight of her story about an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances.

"I just wanted to tell the story of a woman who is badly affected because she exercised her right to freedom of expression. I want to make it known that this could happen to anyone."

Once the documentary was edited, Pimpaka teetered with relief and exhaustion. "It's been my longest-ever film project - it took me three years, shooting on and off, and the story kept on changing!"

She anticipates a political backlash against the movie, possibly against Supinya, and that people will question its veracity and maybe even try to have it blocked.

For her part, Supinya is a rights advocate, so she's not about to question Pimpaka's rights as an artist. So far she hasn't seen the film, but she knows better than most that the truth should be told.

Veena Thoopkrajae

The Nation