TRUTH BETWEEN BELIEF AND BONE*

“Taya,” a young Burmese migrant worker, travels to Thailand in search of her missing grandmother, carrying with her a story she has heard since childhood: that her grandfather was a “Kinnorn,” a half-human, half-divine being from mythology who abandoned his own world for love. Her journey brings her to a small village behind the mountains, surrounded by a deep forest believed by the locals to lie at the foothills of Mount Meru. There, she meets “Thawon,” a forest ranger and a war veteran who places his faith in science and reason. He tells her of an ancient community that once lived within this forest before fading from the history of the land, leaving behind only a handful of descendants and the legends of the Himmapan Forest that continue to be passed down. When three gunshots echo from behind the mountains, accompanied by a faint melody reminiscent of the lullaby her grandmother used to sing to her as a child, Taya and Thawon decide to venture into the forest in search of traces of her grandmother and the truth hidden behind the stories of this community. The deeper they journey into the forest, the more the voice of reason begins to fade, as though something is deliberately burying it beneath the layers of earth, beneath the roots of trees, and beneath stories repeated so many times that they have become truth.