Bang Rajan

The film is set in the middle of the eighteenth century, in the years leading to the fall of Ayutthaya. The villagers of Bang Rajan decide to hold off the Burmese forces without waiting for help from the army, with no proper weapons, no real cannon and nowhere near enough men. The resistance is built out of one assault after another, and the heroism comes with blood, mud and lost children. It does not end in victory; the village is wiped out. Bang Rajan is a national legend in Thailand, and the film tells it as one, as a patriotic epic. Historians argue about where the account comes from: read against Burmese records, the stand may be several separate episodes from different times and places in the war that fused over the years into a single story. The two do not cancel each other out. The film shows what a nation tells itself, and the sources show how that telling was assembled.