The Road to Mandalay
(The Road to Mandalay)

In the 1890s, in Kipling’s poem Mandalay, a British soldier waxes lyrical about discovering the cultures “east of Suez”. In line with his empirical approach to reality, Midi Z, by taking the road to Mandalay, again distances himself from a nostalgic view of the people of Birmania, the country where he was born and which is the focus of his films. Amidst the flow of illegal immigrants snaking from Burma to the outskirts of Bangkok, young Guo meets Lianqing, who like him aspires to a better life in Thailand. With its luminous long shots and enriched by a documented approach and underlying sense of dramaturgy, The Road to Mandalay is also the story of a nascent love painfully put to the test by the hardships of their life as illegal workers. AR