So how do you operate ethically within that unethical reality? The short answer is you don’t. With streamers willing to pay millions, the choice was never really going to be theirs.
THAI CAVE STORY PLUS
Tom Waller, the Thai-born director who released the first film on the subject, a docudrama called The Cave, back in 2019-despite being little-known here, it had the second largest opening in Thailand that week behind Frozen 2- told Asian Plus that when it came to the children, “the authorities were looking to sell their story and life rights to the highest bidder.” Ranging in age from 11 to 17, some stateless, some very poor, these kids would not have been in much of a position to fully own their own narratives. The ethical quandaries around media stories like the Thai cave rescue are virtually impossible to untangle, but this one appears to have been an issue at source. British diver John Volanthen (Farrell’s character) consulted on the film and wrote Thirteen Lessons That Saved Thirteen Lives after declining advances for an autobiography on the grounds that it was “a little bit egotistical.” At the very least he was telling his own story. Then there was the Christian production company, Pure Flix, purchasing rights to a feature film as early as the day the last four boys were saved, later offloading those rights onto MGM, where Ron Howard is making Thirteen Lives, starring Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell, an odd mix of starry casting for a group of divers who were known to be unassuming. Chu)-then refusing The Rescue’s filmmakers any access to any of the principals or their families (co-director Jimmy Chin, who has climbed Everest, described trying to wrestle anything from the streamer to Indiewire as “the most painful experience of our lives”). Netflix appears to have been the biggest vulture, securing the worldwide rights to the boys’ story for a 2022 miniseries (co-executive produced by Jon M.
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Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, co-director of The Rescue, the first documentary about the incident which will be released by National Geographic on Oct. But the rush to claim the 2018 Thai cave rescue, in which a soccer team of 12 boys and their coach were saved by a group of international hobby cave divers after spending two weeks trapped in the flooded Tham Luang cave, was particularly unseemly.
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There’s always been something bluntly distasteful about the way in which the media hungrily circles other people’s trauma.