The Rocket

Ten-year-old Ahlo is the energetic, cheeky, joyous centre of Kim Mordaunt’s drama The Rocket (Sitthiphon Disamoe as Ahlo, main picture), which follows him through a series of challenges towards a triumphant and redeeming final act. That may sound like a familiar narrative arc, but it’s told with new freshness and considerable humour in the film, which is billed as the first ever to come out of Laos.

Made in the Lao language, it’s set in the remote and strikingly beautiful landscapes of the small, cut-off South East Asian nation. The peasant life that we see there may be poor, but continues largely along traditional lines, despite the disruption that came when Laos became, albeit indirectly, involved in the Vietnam war, and was heavily bombed in the process: the explosive relics of that conflict reappear through the film, though its title refers to the firework festivals that are part of local culture.

visually it’s a treat, both the landscapes themselves and the small details of everyday life

One local tradition has it that twin children bring bad luck, so even though Ahlo’s sibling is born dead, he’s left with that reputation, something his feisty grandmother, the comically set-in-her-ways Taitok (Bunsri Yindi), who delivered him in the opening scene, never ceases to bring up when things are going wrong. First, the family’s peaceful rural existence is disrupted by the forces of the outside world when the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam drives them from their home. Rather than the new village complete with electricity and running water they’ve been promised, they end up in what’s virtually a building site.

Far more tragic than that, however, is the accidental death of Ahlo’s loving mother – his relations with his father are cooler – on the journey, another piece of ill fortune attributed to the boy. When he’s disruptive in their new settlement, that sets the other locals against the family. The only new allegiance he gains is friendship with nine-year-old Kia (Loungnam Kaosainam), whose own life hasn’t been easy: all she has left of her family is Uncle Purple (the veteran Thai comic actor, Thep Phongnam), a former child-soldier whose contacts with the Americans from the war years have left him with both an obsession with the singer James Brown, whom he physically resembles, and a fondness for the bottle. (Ahlo and Kia, with Uncle Purple, played by Thep Phongnam, centre, above right).

As the two families move on together in search of a new home (pictured, below left: feisty grandmother Taitok, far right), they come across a town in the midst of preparations for its annual Rocket Festival, a ritual that plays on the local love of explosives as well as supposedly bringing on the rain. It’s a competition which offers considerable prize money, enough to provide a new place to settle for these wanderers, and Ahlo’s participation in it will prove his rite of passage (unlikely though it may seem, you may well find yourself remembering the final scenes of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev here), as well as his reconciliation with his past.

Though there’s a darker story here – one of a country struggling to get over its wounded past, and a traditional society assailed by encroaching modernity – it’s the palpable fun of The Rocket that wins through. Visually it’s a treat, both the landscapes themselves and the small details of everyday life caught by cinematographer Andrew Commis. Director Mordaunt is Australian, and first came to Laos to make a documentary, Bomb Harvest, about local children collecting bombs to sell as scrap metal. The Rocket is the fruit of further collaboration with some of those he encountered on that project, and the combination of outside filmmakers with a local, largely non-professional cast has produced a vibrant, emotional story, which largely resists diversion towards the sentimental. Like its young hero, The Rocket has an energy and excitement that's hard to suppress.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Rocket