Mother is a hybrid of fiction and documentary. It is a portrait of the complicated, fragile, painful and realistic relationship between my mother and me. In the past, she once tried to commit suicide. Though the action was failed, she was disabled. Since the incident, my family has changed forever, and the film is my attempt to explore and understand her, myself and my family. To put it in a wider context, I analogically portrayed how Thai middle class family effect- ed by Asian financial crisis in 1997(Tom Yam Kung Crisis) and explored the representation of family in Thai culture through the process of making this film. Thai media always shows Thai family with one dimension : the good and the bad. To understand the society, we need to go to the smallest institution of it : family. What is Thai family? What is its complexities? What are the ways each member deal with the world outside and inside? How does the family go through the radical change both from Thai society and the destiny and they dances around the reality and the fantasy of the familial representation.—Vorakorn Ruetaivanichkul
The mother of the film's young director was left incapacitated after a failed suicide attempt. Her life and that of her family are thus deeply affected by the woman's mental illness, which led to her frequent recovery in a psychiatric clinic. All this, just when - the end of the 20th century - the economic crisis hit Thailand and the rest of Eastern Asia.—Torino Film Festival