Starring: Sam Sheridan, Gong Prai, Boon Term
Fighting documentaries are often only as entertaining as the combatants they highlight. In the case of Thai Boxing: A Fighting Chance, the director's spotlight is cast upon three unlikely and diverse protagonists - each one an up-and-coming fighter, but all three possessing strikingly different backgrounds and goals.
Like most mixed martial art sports, Muay Thai is no stranger to controversy. A sometimes brutal full contact sport, Muay Thai fighters employ a range of punches, kicks, and knee and elbow strikes to incapacitate their opponents. But even more controversial than Thai Boxing's fighting style are its participants, teenagers and even pre-teens, many of whom look to Thai boxing as their only potential escape from the chains of poverty.
Gong Prai, a 13-year-old Muay Thai fighter from Bangkok embodies the stereotypical Thai boxer. Impoverished, Gong Pry has been training since age four to fight professionally, and already boasts seven knockouts in local bouts. He explains that he took up Muay Thai as a way to earn money for his family and pay for schooling. According to the film's narrator, a top Muay Thai fighter can earn more money in one bout than the average Thailander will earn in a year.
But just as Gong Pry embodies the typical Thai boxer, the film's other two subjects - American Sam Sheridan, and 29-year-old female fighter Boon Term - defy standard categorization.
Sheridan, a Harvard graduate, has been training in Bangkok's top Muay Thai dojo for five months in preparation for his first professional fight. He's an unlikely candidate for Muay Thai - so much so that boxing promoters are forced to import his opponent from Japan because no local fighters are in his weight class.
Boon Term is an equally unlikely combatant, and in the minds of some Muay Thai traditionalists, she is a pariah for no reason other than her gender. Until two years ago, females were forbidden from participating in Thai boxing. Today, females may fight, but they remain relegated to their own ring, located on the outskirts of Bangkok. It's a start. As the narrator explains, when Boon Term was a child, females were forbidden from even touching a Muay Thai ring.
Although directed and produced independently by Washington DC filmmaker Susanne Cornwall, who spent her life savings on the project, Thai Boxing: A Fighting Chance is a noticeably "Un-American" film. Like Cornwall's subjects, her documentary too defies stereotypes. Rather than cheaply (and gratuitously) cashing in on the controversy of surrounding Muay Thai itself, Thai Boxing: A Fighting Chance lets the sport's adherents carry the day - with Cornwall's camera more often than not focusing on the action outside the ring (such as her subjects' rigorous training habits, personal goals, and respect for the sport's code of honor) rather than inside the squared circle.
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