The film "Kru Bannok", or "The Village Teacher", was a blockbuster back in the late Seventies. In it, teacher Piya, imbued with idealstic notions of change and equality, uncovers high level corruption and is assasinated when he tries to counter it.

The film’s director, Surasee Patham (himself a son of Isan) had been swept up in the tsunami of political activism countering the military dictatorship at the time, and fled at nineteen into the jungles of Isan, emerging only seven months later to craft a film depicting the struggle of Northeastern Thai villagers against unruly capitalists and a failed justice system.

Now he has remade the film, and its imminent release is causing some consternation, coming as it does at a time of political turmoil, and unleashed as it will be upon a generation deemed by some to be  less interested by the ideals it espouses.

Surasee is nothing if not bold, and with the spirit of the jungle fighter of the Seventies declares: ''The audience may not want to see socially conscious movies, but to me, the problems faced by the rural people haven't changed in the past 31 years. It's actually getting worse. Now the exploitation of the poor has been systematized and integrated. Before, we fought capitalists, middle-men, politicians and corrupt civil servants. Now, they all work together, or worse, they're from the same family. Business and politics become the same, and their goal is to totally deprive villagers of power. Capitalism forces people to leave their homes to come and serve it in the city, while the government - any government - doesn't seem to be interested in empowering rural people, besides giving hand-outs. I think it's scarier than when I made my first film 31 years ago. Things haven't changed for the better at all.''

Interestingly, the Thai Ministry of Culture supports the new film and has stated that it's message is a good one. 

The moral high ground has lost none of its appeal, although we may be led to question who occupies it.

In August 1967, the CIA issued a classified "Intelligence Memorandum" on Northeast Thailand. The paper reviewed the communist threat to the area from Chinese and Vietnamese trained communists aiming to take advantage of the isolation of Isan at the time, the disconnect between the Northeasterners and the central government of Bangkok (and the regions' geographical and linguistic proximity to Laos), and the relative poverty of these rural areas in a precarious agricultural environment.