Top honors at the recently concluded 12th annual Tribeca Film Festival included Best Narrative Film in the eyes of not only the judges but also the Audience Award competition for The Rocket, written and directed by Kim Mordaunt in what has proven to be an auspicious narrative feature directorial debut.
Additionally The Rocket garnered Best Actor distinction for its 10-year-old star Sitthiphon “Ki” Disamoe who portrays Ahlo, a lad who enters a rocket festival in war torn Laos to help save his impoverished family that’s been uprooted for the construction of a dam.
The Rocket was the only best-of-festival winner to register on both the Audience and professional judging fronts at Tribeca; each Best Narrative Film honor earned a $25,000 prize, meaning that the film scooped up a total of $50,000 in competition. Plus $2,500 was awarded to Disamoe for his performance as Ahlo.
Mordaunt is an accomplished documentarian, his most recent documentary being the feature-length Bomb Harvest about an Australian bomb disposal specialist in Laos and the Lao children who collect bomb scrap metal to sell. Mordaunt directed and lensed Bomb Harvest which was theatrically released around Australia and nominated for Best Documentary (IF Awards, ATOM Awards and Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards), Best Director (ADG Awards), Best Cinematography (AFI Awards) and won Best Feature (Children’s Rights) at Hollywood’s Artivist Awards.
Bomb Harvest spawned The Rocket as Mordaunt explained, “The Lao and international response to the film [Bomb Harvest] was that we should make another film with a Lao child as a protagonist. And because Laos didn’t have a funded film industry, we should be the team [headed by myself and producer Sylvia Wilczynski] to endeavor to make Laos’ first internationally released feature film. Having met Lao Pauline Phayvanh Phoumindr when she was working as a translator on Bomb Harvest, the three of us knew we wanted to all make another film together. And so began a long period of research, writing and casting to develop The Rocket.”
All the characters in The Rocket are based on real people Mordaunt and his colleagues have met while living and working in Laos. When Ahlo meets the mischievous orphan Kia and her uncle Purple, he begins to find hope again after the loss of his mother. “Laos, despite its tragic war history, has a remarkable ability to keep moving forward, finding spirit and humor in great adversity; most Lao people believe that all aspects of life must be filled with Muan [fun] or it is not worth living,” shared Mordaunt. “The Rocket is filled with that spirit.”
Mordaunt described The Rocket Festival in Laos, which provokes the sky gods for rain at the end of dry season each year, as being “a simultaneously tense and riotous ancient fertility festival. It is now, more than ever, powerfully symbolic as water is increasingly controlled by multinational corporations. It’s a hotpot event where people come together and vent their communal need for affirmation–and for Ahlo to survive he must find this (in a community, in his family and in himself).”
To capture the festival’s genuine flavor, Mordaunt and crew filmed at an actual rocket fest in Laos. Mordaunt then scripted and storyboarded around some of the best moments they encountered. Six months later with cast and crew, they recreated the rocket festival in the same location, meshing the scripted scenes and the documentary footage. “This gives the fable-like quality of the film a strong subtext and edge as we see the real people of the most bombed country on the planet shoot back at the sky,” said Mordaunt.
Having shot much verite himself, Mordaunt noted that his main objective with DP Andy Commis was to shoot The Rocket on the shoulder so there was “a synergy between lens and our characters–especially with the children and newer actors where having to hit too many marks can become confusing and false. I liked to keep takes as loose and long as possible to let the children search for things in each other and to allow for a certain amount of ‘play’ where responses start to become spontaneous and real. This meant quite a lot of re-scripting on the run where I tried to serve the actors’ voices and the story at hand.
“As most of the cast was new to acting, or had done a small amount of high theatre or ‘soap,’ the first stage of rehearsal,” continued Mordaunt, “was to remove a sense of ‘audience’ from the intimacy of moments and to find a more credible orbit–building responses from real places and histories in our performers’ lives.”
Judges’ feedback
The jurors for Tribeca’s 2013 World Narrative Competition were Bryce Dallas-Howard, Blythe Danner, Paul Haggis, Kenneth Lonergan, and Jessica Winter.
In bestowing the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature on Mordaunt’s film, the jury issued a statement which read: “The Rocket is a spectacular achievement that is powerful and delightful in equal measures. Artfully structured and gorgeously shot, it chronicles the struggles of a displaced family while steering well clear of either sentimentality or despair. Complex in its tone and characterizations, the film takes an unflinching – and edifying – look at the suffering caused both by a legacy of war and the new status quo of economic globalization. And yet, while never losing sight of those grim realities, it also offers us a transcendent tale of hope and perseverance in a world that few Westerners ever have the chance to see.”
As for the performance of Disamoe, the jury assessment read: “One of the great pleasures this year was the discovery of this young, non-professional actor, who plays his role with an irresistible blend of pluck, stoic determination and vulnerability. Sitthiphon Disamoe carried a big, ambitious production on his small shoulders, with charm and grace to spare.”
In terms of what’s next for Mordaunt after Tribeca, he is currently developing two features with producer Wilczynski–Zig Zag and Pink Mist.
