Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy

Take the Twitter feed of a random teenage girl – 410 tweets, to be exact, verbatim, without skipping any and without changing the sequence.
For his second feature, Thai director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit (whose feature debut was in the Tiger Awards Competition last year) decided to forge a new narrative from this stream of random, often meaningless fragments of a life into a new narrative. The story that emerges is that of Mary, who is grappling with the vicissitudes of life in her senior year of secondary school. She squabbles with her best friend Suri, with whom she is compiling the yearbook, and she falls in love with the mysterious M.
The texts on screen – roughly two sentences a minute – determine the jumpy editing, so during the first half hour Mary gets involved in all kinds of capers, from buying a squid to an unplanned trip to Paris. Along the way, however, Thamrongrattanarit is able to cram a surprising amount of emotion into the story.