Koraphat Cheeradit’s short film Yesterday Is Another Day is being shown today as part of The Political Wanderer, a programme of short films at Silpakorn University’s Faculty of Information and Communication Technology. (The programme also includes Weerapat Sakolvaree’s Nostalgia.)
In Yesterday Is Another Day, a high school student plays hooky and meets his girlfriend in a woodland. They take a walk, and joke about their future together, seemingly without a care in the world. But there are ominous signs of impending threats: they find a discarded handgun, and Koraphat inserts shots of a JCB digging up the forest.
Eventually, we learn that the student is being charged with lèse-majesté, for sharing Facebook posts. His court hearing is the following day, and he is likely to be jailed. (The film doesn’t state directly that he’s facing royal defamation charges, though it’s clear from the couple’s conversation: he explains that the sentence is three years per offence, which is the minimum jail term for lèse-majesté.)
In Yesterday Is Another Day, a high school student plays hooky and meets his girlfriend in a woodland. They take a walk, and joke about their future together, seemingly without a care in the world. But there are ominous signs of impending threats: they find a discarded handgun, and Koraphat inserts shots of a JCB digging up the forest.
Eventually, we learn that the student is being charged with lèse-majesté, for sharing Facebook posts. His court hearing is the following day, and he is likely to be jailed. (The film doesn’t state directly that he’s facing royal defamation charges, though it’s clear from the couple’s conversation: he explains that the sentence is three years per offence, which is the minimum jail term for lèse-majesté.)
The prospect of criminal charges for posting on social media is a reality for hundreds of people in Thailand today, many of whom are students. As the boy in Koraphat’s film says to his girlfriend, he has to face changing from “being a teenager to being a prisoner.” Recent student protests have called for the abolition of the lèse-majesté law, and the Move Forward Party’s manifesto includes a proposal to amend it, though this faced overwhelming opposition in parliament.
Yesterday Is Another Day is a powerful and moving reminder of the severe consequences of lèse-majesté, and what it must feel like to be criminalised at a young age for expressing opinions online. It’s a less angry film than Koraphat’s Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now! (ฉันแต่งงานกับปัจจุบัน ช่วยตัวเองด้วยเมื่อวาน และมีเพศสัมพันธ์กับวันพรุ่งนี้), though the two films do have something in common: their titles are both puns on ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’. (Yesterday Is Another Day refers to ‘tomorrow is another day’, popularised by Gone with the Wind).
Yesterday Is Another Day is a powerful and moving reminder of the severe consequences of lèse-majesté, and what it must feel like to be criminalised at a young age for expressing opinions online. It’s a less angry film than Koraphat’s Tomorrow I Fuck with Yesterday Now! (ฉันแต่งงานกับปัจจุบัน ช่วยตัวเองด้วยเมื่อวาน และมีเพศสัมพันธ์กับวันพรุ่งนี้), though the two films do have something in common: their titles are both puns on ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’. (Yesterday Is Another Day refers to ‘tomorrow is another day’, popularised by Gone with the Wind).
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