Five minutes into Thai-director Uruphong Raksasad's fictional, documentary-style film, Agrarian Utopia, we find ourselves watching a 2007 rally of the People's Power Party, a party allied with former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.  The male heads of the two farming households on which the film focuses for its two hours sit and listen.  One of them loses interest quickly and walks off, just as People's Power Party leader Samak Sundaravej comes to the podium.  As we follow the farmer winding his way out of the crowd, Samak laments that Thailand has suffered from a coup, despite having crafted a constitution in 1997 that he says was "among the world's most democratic."  He refers to the 2006 coup that removed Thaksin from office. 

 

Having found himself under a mountain of debt, the main character has already decided to take his family to the countryside and farm with his friend.  The remainder of the film follows the two families through two seasons of the rice crop, the first ending in a disappointing payout from the middleman that is mostly claimed by the landlord who needs to pay back a car loan of his own, and the second ending prematurely with the landowner announcing that he has sold the land and needs the farmers to vacate it for the new owners.  We watch through the two seasons as the families plant and harvest rice, struggle to train a water buffalo to plow the field, and scrounge for any available food source: snakes and rats from the fields, beehives that they find in trees and on the nearby temple.  We watch as their children bathe in rain puddles and split their time between helpful contributions to the families' tasks and play.  The slow scenes, what A.O. Scott in the New York Times called the "weary endurance" of the farmers, test the endurance of the modern film-watcher but also succeed in transporting the viewers to the wet-rice agricultural life that remains common to so many rural citizens of Southeast Asia.