Logline

A 17-year-old Muslim minority girl from a fishing community, trying every way to save her hometownand the environment from the government’s industrial zone plan.

Synopsis

17-year-old Khairiyah from a fishing community in Southern Thailand’s Chana District, actively involved in environmental protection since childhood, now takes up the struggle against the government’s plans to make a giant industrial park in her coastal town. 

While feeling a duty to write a letter to the Thai Prime Minister, travel 18 hours to Bangkok to protest and file complaints with as many organisations possible, including the UN, Khairiyah continues to help her father on the fishing boat and figure out college application.

Being named after the last battle in the Quran and having witnessed older generation struggling to protect the environment and the livelihood throughout her childhood, Khairiyah hopes this will be Chana’s last conflict. 

Premise

Born and raised in a fishing community in Southern Thailand’s Songkla Province, Chana District, Khairiyah, has a deep attachment to the sea.  She is deeply concerned by the impact that a proposed mega industrial project will have on Chana District.  What the project’s backers call “the (Chana) New Engine of Industrial Zone” will see factories, refiners and a port built on 6,622 acres of expropriated land, irreversibly altering a long stretch of coast and destroying the sea based livelihoods of some 300,000 local citizen.

Home to villagers that have lived on fishing for generations, Chana district is a picturesque coastal community, whose way of life is now under direct threat. Khairiyah knows that if the mega project goes ahead her community will suffer the same fate as the villagers uprooted by the Map Ta Phut Industrial Estate, a once idyllic coastal community now infamous for toxic pollution from factories and some of the highest rates of cancer in South East Asia.

Many people in Khairiyah’s community, including her parents, mobilised to oppose a toxic gas separation plant built in Chana District in 1997. Now at 17 years old, Khairiyah has joined the struggle to preserve Chana’s unique way of life.

While running a youth outreach program geared at spreading local indigengous knowledge and marine restoration, Khairiyah begins a public protest sleeping in front of Songkhla City Hall as part of her letter writing campaign to the Prime Minister’s Office in Bangkok some 600 miles away from Khairiyah’s southern Muslim community. Traveling to Bangkok, Khairiyah as a villager from Thailand’s marginalised deep south, is in many ways an outsider in her own country. Her struggle to stop the government’s plans for Chana District, follows a long and hard journey, with the Bangkok based project backers determined to steam roll over local opposition and the advice of environmental experts.

Despite many setbacks and challenges Khairiyah, however, remains undeterred in her mission to speak truth to power and protect Chana for future generations.