Peesua Lae Dokmai (1985)

Butterfly and Flowers is a heartwarming coming of age story. Huyan is a young Muslim teen struggling with poverty. His mother died and his father is a laborer. He’s an excellent student and popular with the other students. When his father chooses to pay for a school fee instead of buying rice for the family Huyan decides to drop out of school. Selling popsicles on the street he hopes to earn enough money to send his siblings to school. When an accident pushes the impoverished family closer to the edge he feels he has no other choice than to go to work for the rice smugglers so that they can survive. The question he keeps asking of himself is, “what does it take to be a good person?”

The young rice smugglers hide bags of rice on trains and try to avoid the conductor checking for tickets by riding on the top of the trains. The work is dangerous and the risk of getting hurt or arrested looms over the boys every day. Far from being a gloomy story, Huyan makes friends and provides for his family. A sweet romance develops between him and Minpee, a girl he knew from school who loves flowers and butterflies.

Huyan will ultimately have to make decisions for his family’s future and his future with Minpee. Whether those decisions will lead to him being a good person of course is always the question.

The acting in this movie is very natural. I was quickly drawn into Huyan’s life and desire to take care of his family. There are no villains, only people trying to feed themselves and their families. Much of the action and conversations take place on trains. Are they moving toward something better or something worse?

Huyan’s goal for himself is familiar to many people---how to be a good person? “It’s tricky.”

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