The Long Walk

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The Long Walk
Laos, Spain, Singapore | 2019| 116’ | DCP | Colour | Lao | Group: C
Director: Mattie Do

What happens if you were left behind by society and stuck in a time warp, and your only companions are ghosts of other forgotten people? In our age of modernity, when progress seems inevitable, when the old must give way to the new, regret can be the painful baggage that keeps you from moving on. With The Long Walk, director Mattie Do, playfully meshes living spirits, long forgotten murders and a touch of sci-fi to create a film filled with longing and lost love. Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy, an experienced stage actor and well-known comedian in Laos, brings dignity, mystery and quiet sorrow to the lead character, whom we faithfully follow throughout the film. There is a lot to admire about a film set in rural South East Asia that does not reduce the characters to being victims of their circumstances and The Long Walk is one such film.

– Lorna Tee

An old man walks the dusty roads between his isolated farm and the nearby rural village in the company of a silent spirit whose death he witnessed fifty years earlier. For decades, the old man’s regret over losing his mother to tuberculosis has bred a pathological need to ease the suffering of the terminally ill, and over the years, he has quietly euthanized several sick women. As he realizes that his spectral companion is able to transport him back in time, the old man trespasses into his own past to set in motion a plan to convince his younger self to preempt his mother’s terminal suffering. But he is unaware of the dire consequences his actions will have on the future…

Born in California to refugees of Laos’ Communist Revolution, Mattie Do was raised in Los Angeles, but returned to Laos a decade ago after her father retired in Vientiane. In 2012, Do directed her first feature film, Chanthaly – the ninth feature film produced in the country of Laos since the 1975 revolution, the first to feature a female protagonist, and the first Lao feature film to be directed by a woman. Her second feature Dearest Sister (2016) had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in the US as was later selected as Laos’ first official submission to the 90^th Academy Awards.