Director's Statement
The first image was the discovery of two female corpses. The TV
reporters zoomed in on the tiger-face underwear worn by one of them.
The police thought they were call girls who had ended up murdered by
their clients. It was an all too convenient guess, which was quickly
discounted. Three days later, police found clues that led to the arrest of a
man in his 20s, and two other accomplices were brought in. Juicy sex and
bloody headlines. Pure tabloid up-close-and-personal reportage. "The
Young and Dangerous: Alarming Youth Crimes in Cold Blood," so they
said. That was not all.
The young man's mother was rounded up as well. They photographed and
handcuffed her. She had been instrumental in the crime that her son had
committed. The reporters applied other buzz words: "overbearing parents
hampering child's growth. How the young became too dangerous. Neatly
packed psychological summation. Cause and effect and the straightest
line to the solution." It made good headlines. They could not criticize
enough the obvious social ills as a result of these: the failure of the
education system, out-of-control media representation of sex and and
violence, corruption as an acceptable social norm, and everything else
that is fast, cheap, and out of control. I received no satisfactory answers. The reporting aimed
to be complete, probing almost violently. Yet, it remained
as inconclusive and elusive as the mother and son's
blank faces on TV. So, I started asking questions, mostly
of anthropological interests: the neighbourhood, the
economic condition, the vocations, the schedules, the
hobbies, the relationships, etc. By mapping out the linear
trajectories of these people, I try to reconstruct the
broken pieces and make them more or less complete
again. I would like to know what it was like in the
beginning. Nonetheless, the beginning presents
endless possibilities and can only remain vague. The
only sure thing is the end, because violence has a way of
cutting short all possible communications.
Presumptuously, I have presumed here to suggest how
they came to be. Within the limited temporal experience
of a film, I have realised that all of us will still be
complete outsiders, no matter what happens. This film is an account of an inevitable loss that takes shape slowly,
in which every character reasonably chooses a side and
makes certain decisions that soon work against them in
the worst possible way.
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