Luscious avocado plantations. Smoke rising on the horizon. Then echoes of explosions. In the “Envelope”, just before the border with Gaza, Yo, Tom, Yan, Piak and Lee work in Israeli fields. Like many other migrant workers, they were recruited from Thailand. They work for below-market wages, often seven days a week, up to 17 hours a day, to support their distant families. They are being observed by a robot snake that crawls through the fields looking for Hamas tunnels beneath the farmland. Bullet casings among the weeds, makeshift shelters in front of the barracks – a psychogeography of fear and vulnerability. Sometimes, in brief moments of leisure, the light-hearted games and the community of young men provide a distraction. On 7 October 2023, the underworld opens up and interrupts the film, which then shifts to the families of the victims. On the banks of the Mekong, the mythical snake god Naga guards the threshold between the living and the dead. An intangible, floating and empathic narrative about precarious labour movements through a military-agrarian complex.

Jan Künemund