“I didn’t say anything about flatulence,” said Civilai. “Gas is a different beast altogether. Gas is containable and controllable. Flatulence sneaks out at inopportune moments. You won’t be hearing any wind instruments from me this evening. No, Sir. I’ll know when it’s time for me to empty my gas and I shall . . .”

“Civilai, spare us,” said Madam Daeng.

“. . . head off in an orderly fashion, open the valve, release the pressure and return with you all none the wiser.”

“Except now we’ll all guess where you’re going and what you’re doing,” said Daeng. “Even if you’re not.”

“I’m feeling quite off my food already,” said Bruce.

“Ah, Son, you’ll have to put up with a lot worse than this before our film is complete,” said Siri. “This is just a sort of test.”

Bruce, alias Deesabun, had arrived back in Laos the previous week. He was twenty-two with dyed-blond hair, had an earring in his left lobe and carried eight kilograms more than he really needed. He’d been a quick learner in Australia and was already assured a lucrative career in TV production. But in the cutting room at SBS in Sydney he’d seen the conditions in the refugee camps and heard the struggling Lao government’s pleas for qualified personnel to come home. His conscience got the better of him. It was a romantic notion to return to the country of his birth with something of value to offer. His cousin at the Fuji film lab had written to him about a group of visionaries who had written a film script. They had a Panavision camera they couldn’t operate. They needed Bruce.

Upon his return, he’d met Siri and Civilai who had begun their romance with cinema half a century before in France. He was astounded by the depth and breadth of their knowledge of film. Their script, on the other hand—rewritten by the Ministry of Culture to incorporate Comrades Lenin and Marx, altered again by the Women’s Union to raise the profile of women and returned to its original state by its writer, Siri Paiboun—would have been impossible to film in its present state. They had just the one camera, no permission to travel to locations and a budget that wouldn’t have paid for sandwiches and lemonade on a B-movie set in Australia.

What they lacked in resources and ability, they more than made up for in alcohol. The first official executive directorial meeting was convened immediately after the evening noodle rush. The tables were clean, the utensils were spotless and a crate of Bordeaux sat at the feet of Madam Daeng, who wielded the corkscrew. The wine was the last from the cellar of the French Embassy, closed for the past two years due to a misunderstanding: the French thought Laos was still a colony.