History walked in wearing the face of Wanlop Rungkumjad. The first Thai to claim Best Actor at the 27th Taipei Film Festival, the so-called throne room where cinema gets consecrated.
Mongrel delivered him there, a Taiwanese sledgehammer directed by Chiang Wei Liang and You Qiao Yin. Rungkumjad and his colleague Atchara Suwan breathe life into the undocumented, embodying those who exist like ghosts made flesh in society’s blind spots.
The movie’s synopsis goes: An undocumented Thai immigrant moves through Taiwan's rugged mountain shadows. For survival, he tends to the elderly and disabled while his own spirit fractures. Days blur into survival, each breath borrowed time. When dignity starts slipping through cracked hands, the film asks: when everything conspires to hollow you out, what's left to call your own?
With the gold horse in his hands, standing before the crowd and Mandarin sharp on his tongue, Rungkumjad said:
‘Before Mongrel, I was ready to give up. I thought it was my last shot at acting. But Taiwanese cinema gave me a rebirth. It made me part of something bigger.’
Throwing it back to 2019, Manta Ray was a submerged meditation directed by Phuttiphong Aroonpheng. Rungkumjad played a fisherman sheltering a Rohingya refugee that caught Venice’s eyes and The Orizzonti Award for Best Film landed in Thai hands for the first time.
Six years forward, Rungkumjad has discovered what the margins know well: truth lives in the spaces too dangerous for the centre. In Mongrel, he becomes translator of the untranslatable, making the invisible burn bright enough this time for many. It might be rooted in a world you don't quite know, the backdrop is hyper-specific, almost claustrophobic but the ache and the fight to be seen are universal.
The world was bound to clock Thai brilliance. The timing just had to align and this time, it did.