This program deals with confrontations with biological parents, a topic usually heavy and difficult to process. Ponay (or You’re Not F***ing Welcome) opens with double struggles as a nonbinary person in Southern Thailand (where “ponay” means social dissent or “queer”), against the binary military conscription and the conservative father figure. Hi ading (meaning “little one” in Ilocano language) reminds us that younger queer people often forget what their parents have been through, especially as racialized migrants in Canada. My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness is not a film full of sadness, but a transformative reflection that lays bare the director’s intimate moments in childhood in Indonesia and now adulthood in Germany. Tragedy comically ends the program with a mockumentary note, a re-narration of footage the director made during their childhood as if (or if ever) they and their mother committed murder on their father. While the program confronts some parental guilt, it acknowledges the same love trajectory we can learn from and carry onwards.

Ponay (or You Are Not F***ing Welcome)
Cherry is one bureaucratic checkmark away from obtaining a gender identity exemption for the military draft: they ‘just’ have to travel from Bangkok to their family home in Thailand’s deep south to get a residency document. On this final stretch, not only do they have to deal with their conservative family’s outright rejection and abuse, but even those who do recognise their queerness harbour misplaced expectations towards how Cherry performs their gender.


Thailand, 2024

Thai. Subtitles in English
