The Grass Route is based on a harsh reality but for the film I am looking for a very different direction. I want to use the enclosed environment of the marihuana plantation as a 'portal' to Thuâ`n's naive and distorted view on the western world. I will take the audience on a visual journey that makes them understand the choices Thuâ`n makes by placing them in his perspective. Despite the tragic ending, I want the film to be an ode to our imagination as a means for survival.
Paul Sin Nam Rigter
I want to portray Thuâ`n's
concrete smuggling route in a documentary style. Raw and fragmentary. From a semi-point of view, the viewer experiences what Thuâ`n sees and
hears. My starting point is to make the actual journey with a documentary crew.
Obviously an adapted and condensed version, but we film as many 'real'
fragments as possible to enhance the sense of documentary. In this way, I hope
to get close to, and honour, the lived experience.
The first part of the film ends when the door of the cannabis
plantation is closed behind him. Thuâ`n's journey then comes to an end for the
time being. Or rather, the concrete journey. Only now does his inner journey
begin.
The middle part of the
screenplay, set in the cannabis farm, forms the inner journey. The inner journey Thuâ`n goes through is a coming-of-age story told
entirely from Thuâ`n's experience. Viewers see and know no more than Thuâ`n does. I want to focus on the honour he derives from taking care of the plants to show Thuâ`n is in this story not
just a victim, but someone with agency who is persistent in pursuing his goal.
The scenes in the cannabis
plantation contrast with the scenes we shoot documentary. The cannabis
plantation becomes a world of its own: a world where different laws
apply. Not the law of realism applies here, but of impressionism. Once
Thuâ`n moves into this cocoon, the world shapes itself to his perspective. As
the film progresses, the set becomes less a representation of the
oppressive cannabis plantation and more a magical imagination of
Thuâ`n's inner world. The weed plantation transforms into a jungle, the
foil-clad rooms seem otherworldly and the pixelated city in the racing game
becomes a real city. Thus, in the plantation, other worlds open up in which
Thuâ`n can escape his monotonous existence.
The racing game is the trigger for a friendship between Thuâ`n and Carlo, but it is also an escape from reality. It symbolises Thuâ`n's search for a better life. The racing world gives me the freedom as a filmmaker to create a surreal atmosphere that indicates how the dream world is increasingly taking over from reality. I want to use the game footage as Thuâ`n's subjective window to the outside world, as a dream world in which he can wander freely and live the same life as us free Europeans.
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