Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy.

Mary is in her final year at a boarding school. She has to put together the graduation yearbook with her closest friend Suri. Meanwhile her boyfriend leaves, the school imposes absurd rules, a camel turns up from somewhere, and Mary keeps narrating. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit writes and directs. The source is unusual. The director took 410 consecutive tweets by a Thai schoolgirl and turned them into a screenplay without changing their order. Every tweet has its counterpart in the film as a scene or an intertitle. The method breaks the narrative by its nature. Scenes do not connect, the logic jumps, one passage runs realistically and the next is wholly absurd. The reason is not a search for style but the source itself. What comes out is the formal equivalent of adolescence: scattered, overstated, suddenly serious and immediately senseless again. It became one of the most discussed examples of Thai independent cinema and travelled the international festivals. Who it is for: viewers who like formal experiment and contemporary Thai cinema. Who it is not for: the narrative never gathers, it runs long, and the technique itself can become tiring after a while.