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Documentary Film Project

Primary Location: Narathiwat, Thailand

Zakariya Amataya won the Southeast Asia Writers Award (or, SEAWrite) in 2010 for the trilingual poetry collection No Woman in Poetry (2010) and went to Hawaii as an artist-in-residence at the Doris Duke Shangri La Museum of Art, Culture and Design. In Hawaiʻi, I started to document his journey and the mutual love for the sea that inspired his second collection, If as Deep as the Ocean Within Us (2013). When he finally returned to his hometown of Narathiwat, after living in Thailand's capital city for over two decades, I followed him with my camera around this fascinating borderland landscape. He is currently at work on his third poetry collection and manages a literary and intellectual yearbook from the region called The Melayu Review. Che also partners with community organizations to organize writing workshops and grassroots media channels to help rebuild a space that has, since the imposition of martial law in 2004, experienced significant restrictions on political speech.