อ้อม (Aom)

Feature Film - In Development

(script available - 80mins)

Director: David E Woodley

Screenwriter: David E Woodley

Genre: Thriller

At four years of age Aom, a happy little girl from the north-eastern rural region of Isaan, Thailand, who spends her day playing with her pet chicken, reluctantly moves to Samut Sakhorn, a heavily polluted industrial area of west Bangkok, with her mother Mae to work a food cart in the market street of Om Noi.

While Mae bends for hours cooking over a sizzling wok seven days a week, Aom stands on a small plastic stool taking money from the local factory workers and counts out their change. As the last shift workers head home with their small plastic bags of hot 'Nam Tok', Mae would finally get to eat. As she ate, little Aom, resting her head in her mother's lap, would ask her mother about the world. When they might go back home to Isaan? If chicken survived the rice harvest? What the bright lights in the sky were called? Her mother tells her that one day they will go back to Isaan. That chicken is much too smart to get caught and cooked up. And the brightest star is called Venus and it can be seen from everywhere in the world at the same time. So, if she is homesick, all she needs to do is look up to it and she'll know that her family is not far away looking as well.

It's not until Aom is sixteen that Mae can afford to send Aom to school where, on the grounds of the local Buddhist temple, Aom would learn as much as she can sitting for hours in the sweltering open classroom with children half her age learning how to read and write. She would then ride the bumpy red bus with the slatted wooden floor back home to Om Noi with her best friend Nee to once again help her mother in the market street.

One morning eighteen year old Aom is awoken by her two cats Ting and Tong waiting to be fed. She's bewildered as to why her mother hadn't woken her and she thinks maybe it is a holiday and her mother has gone to the temple to pray. Aom lays back staring out the glass window to the polluted sky daydreaming about Isaan when she hears a noise coming from the bathroom. She investigates and soon finds her mother collapsed on the bathroom floor. Aom frantically rouses the next-door neighbours to help get her mother to hospital where she suddenly dies from complications.

Aom continues to work the food cart but struggles to survive so she has no option but to leave Om Noi when Nee convinces her to go with her to the idyllic island resort of Koh Samui to work bar. Here she can make more money just by sitting and talking to the farangs (foreigners) in one night than she would cooking in the market street seven days a week.

In the seaside village of Lamai, Aom finds life full. Sleeping in a one-room bungalow with Nee and four other girls and one lady-boy who work the same bar. Cleaning and setting up the bar from the night before where she would make ten baht for each glass of heavily diluted whisky she is shouted by the; international tourists, raucous English football fans, hens and bachelor parties, honeymooners, backpackers, businessmen and women, and the single lonely traveller. It's a job that many frown upon and her mother would not have agreed to but at least Aom gets to decide the hours she works, whom she talks to, and whom she sleeps with for an extra 300baht a night.

After a few months Aom meets Mike Reynolds, a smooth-talking loner who would sit for hours drinking the local Sangsom with coke as he plays Jenga with Ploy, the lesbian 'boss-bar'. He's charming and says funny things and there’s nothing Thai people like better than to laugh. After a whirlwind romance, Mike offers to take Aom back to Australia on a working holiday visa on the promise that she can make some real money working a friend's cocktail bar on the popular Gold Coast tourist strip. For Aom, or for any of the girls, it's a dream come true to be given the chance of a better life.

However, once in Australia, Aom soon realises dreams can very easily turn to nightmares.

To be continued...