Pop Aye

With immense heart and a splash of surrealism, this wonderfully eccentric road movie traces a journey across Thailand like no other. When Thana (Thaneth Warakulnukroh), a successful Bangkok architect in the midst of a midlife crisis, is reunited with an elephant he knew growing up, he and the lumbering pachyderm embark on an odyssey back to his childhood home in the idyllic Thai countryside, along the way crossing paths with a pair of nonplussed local police officers, a forlorn transgender sex worker, and a mysteriously wise drifter. As the encounters multiply and the bond between man and elephant deepens, filmmaker Kirsten Tan weaves a by turns funny and curiously moving look at the universal search for meaning.