More on Wisit Sasanatieng's Muay Thai movie Suriya

Wisit Sasanatieng is at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, taking part in the Tiger Awards jury. The fest is also screening his latest movie, The Red Eagle.

When he was making The Red Eagle, Wisit said he was finished with making movies for the studios. He's looking to get back to making movies his way, and so he's pitching his first independent project, Suriya, at Cinemart.

He sent along a snazzy poster for the Muay Thai picture, which is a biographical drama about a fighter named Suriya Lukthung, a gifted and ingenious boxer. Here's more of his story:

Nobody knows about his mysterious origin.

He is thin and skinny like a sick person. But once he is on the boxing stadium, he becomes a killer, fast and furious. With his boxing style “double kicks” and “double elbows” which he invents. No one has ever stood up to round three.

He uses alcohol to carry on life and sleeps at a cheap whorehouse every night.

He is not under any boxing camp. No one ever sees him practice.

Every time he wins. He will take the prize money and leave quietly with disregard for any honorable reputation.

Later people will see him at the whorehouse surrounded with prostitutes. The liquor is in his hand and the cigarette is in the mouth. With his sleepy eyes, he is such a different person comparing with the one on the canvas.

His life goes like fireworks, and it ended quickly.

Soon after he lives in extreme, he gets a bad disease from prostitutes. Then he has to go to the fight just to make money to cure himself. He still beats the rival as always although it's not fast like before.

Finally, when his health starts deteriorating, the defeat begins to come online.He still fights with a weaken body and his eyes are near blind because of the syphilis.

But he never lets himself be knocked out at the boxing stadium. He just asks for surrender once he is aware that his time has come.

The rest of his life is facing hard liquor. He drinks as if to kill himself. He drinks morbidly until he gets crazy. He dies later.

A short moment before he died, someone saw him drunk, standing and holding a balloon in the rain. Then he let it rise to the sky, clapping and laughing merrily as if a child.

As Twitch's Todd Brown says, it's "the story of such a larger than life character seems perfectly suited to Sasanatieng's larger than life style. Hopefully this one finds the backing it needs."