Karaoke Girl

It’s often been tried and has often failed: mixing fiction and documentary. The elegant mix of both genres in this film raises the question of why it’s so complex, because here the effect is above all very natural.
The film focuses on the Karaoke Girl – real-life person and dramatised one in a single character: Sa Sittijun, an escort girl in Bangkok. She grew up in a village in the countryside and at the age of 15 was sent to work in the big city. She worked for three years in a factory and concluded that the only way to support her family was to sell her body. At the moment when the director met Sa, she was a karaoke hostess with four years’ experience.
The filmmaker and her ‘actress’ first spent several weeks together; only then did Visra Vichit Vadakan start writing a screenplay about her protagonist. By then she knew Sa like her own sister. For an intimate portrait of an escort girl, the film is remarkably discreet. It’s about dreams and feelings, not so much about paid sex.
Visra and Sa become friends; there is no other way to describe it. Visra follows Sa on her way back to her birthplace and is received into the poor yet warm family. Sa steps into the imagination of the filmmaker in order to shape her own life. A unique amalgamation. And a singular cinematographic formula.

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