Current Work: Migrant WARRIORS
Migrant Warriors
Two boxing champions, one Karen, one Rohingya, both illegal Burmese migrants living on the Thai-Myanmar border, navigate more than a decade as part of the cross-border boxing fight game, in a story that becomes, against expectations, not one of boxing but one of identity, belonging and home.
Migrant Warriors, a documentary following the story of three protagonists subsumed in a brutal, bizarre, and ever raw migrant and cross-border fight game.
“If I go back home as I am now, what will they say. ‘He’s just like before.’ I will go home when I am better than them. Until then I will keep going to the end of the world.”
Prophetic words from Pyit Thein Aung, one of three primary characters in the documentary Migrant Warriors. He is a former Myanmar National boxing champion, fighting in the ring as a child because, “Everybody called me a faggot and a lady-boy.” Arriving on the Thai-Myanmar border illegally looking for work, he lives in a fringe-dwelling Rohingya community. The second character, Pa Kyaw Her, is a stateless eleven-year-old Karen kid earning five to twenty cents a day herding buffalo. I first film him boxing at a Thai-Karen mountain temple festival. “I think about supporting my family through boxing. I’ll earn money to buy land and build a house. My family doesn’t have a house. We have no home in Myanmar or Thailand.” The third character, Uncle Djow, is a karaoke singing cowboy and Thailand’s preeminent promoter of Burmese boxers. A local boxing coach says: ”The latecomers speak too cheaply. They are cheats selling dead cats. For the real deal in bare-knuckle kick-boxing, Uncle Djow.” “Boxing is art and culture,” says Uncle Djow.
A former National champion, a kid with dreams of being a champion, a boxing promoter whose influence erodes as increasingly powerful rivals jostle for control of cross-border and migrant boxers.
This is Migrant Warriors, and these are the protagonists, their lives documented through more than ten years of filming and interviewing. It is one hell of a story.
The genesis of Migrant Warriors: read where it began