Un Certain Regard: “Soi Cowboy” by Thomas Clay

Director Thomas Clay, presenting “Soi Cowboy” in the Un Certain Regard selection, makes his second visit to the Cannes Festival. The 29-year-old British director was welcomed at Critics’ Week in 2005 with his first feature-length film, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael.

Soi Cowboy tells the tale of a strange love affair between a fat European and a pregnant young Thai woman. She is resigned to the need to protect herself and her unborn child, and sees this lover as her best bet. Meanwhile, in the countryside, a young gangster has pledged to deliver his own brother’s head…

For Thomas Clay, “Antonioni remains an enduring inspiration, both as a filmmaker and a world citizen. No-one else captured the 20th century with the same degree of precision, insight, texture and depth of feeling and his passing was a sad moment for cinema. There are a couple of scenes in Soi Cowboy that may be accused of homage, although I’ve tried to exclude anything that is not internally justified by the material.”

The director, accompanied on stage by his two producers, Joseph Lang and Tom Waller, described how he arrived in Cannes with his film: “I’m happy to be here this morning. The screenplay for Soi Cowboy was written just over a year ago. The characters and the locations are very close to my heart. We shot the film in three weeks and thanks to the dedication and endurance of our majority Thai crew, we managed to get every shot done for the film. After that I edited and mixed the film on a 12” Powerbook which you will see used in the film as a prop. We sent out some CDs and that was it, until about a month ago when I had a call from Cannes. At that point, we managed to get the money together to finish the film, and since then it has just been a mad rush to get it finished and to get it ready in time. Up to the last minute, so the film you are going to see today, I haven’t seen it myself. So if it’s on backwards, we’ll discover that together. Thank you.”