2215 (film): Wonderful documentary of an average person doing the extrordinary
Artiwara Kongmalai is much better known as "Toon Bodyslam," the lead singer of a very popular Thai rock band called Bodyslam. They aren't really popular outside of Thailand because well, their music is in Thai and no one else understands that. However, a few years back "Toon" went and did something extraordinary.
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Toon is not a professional athlete. He isn't even a particularly dedicated runner. However, in an effort to raise money for public hospitals, he decided to run from the southern-most part of his country of Thailand, to the northern-most part of it over the course of 55 days: A grand total of 2215 kilometers.
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Along the way, masses of people gathered in the streets to donate money to the cause and Toon paused along his journey to take about a million selfies with fans. At points his compassion towards the common people was seriously complicating the group's progress because, as you can imagine, they were on a very tight schedule.
The movie documents the trip in its entirety from start to finish using all manor of camera angles. The good, the bad, and the ugly are all recorded and not everything is all sunshine and rainbows as Toon realizes at many points that running for 55 days straight is extremely difficult and he frequently loses his temper only to immediately apologize to the people afterwards. It shows that he is a normal person that "loses his shit" from time-to-time. There are some gruesome moments in the film such as where they need to break up his calf muscle tightening using a technique that involves repeatedly stabbing the muscle tissue with a syringe over and over again. This was tough to watch. :)
While I realize that I probably am inclined to enjoy this more than most people who do not live in this country, I find his dedication and generosity to be inspiring and it is just a great feel-good experience that I thoroughly enjoyed. During and after watching it I felt inspired to be a better person and perhaps to stop bitching when I am running 7km in the jungle on Thursdays.
That’s very nice of you to share this! I didn’t think much of this in the beginning as I thought it was just a PR exercise. But time just proved that he’s a crazy and dedicated person!
What he did really put me to shame!
I am quite a useless person who moans too much sometimes!
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That is pretty inspiring. We have people that do stuff like this occasionally across the US and stuff like that. I am sure you heard of it from time to time while you were here. It is cool that they documented the whole thing though. Usually when you see the news stories you just see the good and happy parts. You don't see the needles and cramps and craziness!
Compassion and solidarity for others are fundamental to making a better world. People like Artiwara Kongmalai are inspiring, wanting is power. Thanks for sharing, friend @gooddream