Lia Has to Go Home
2025 · 20m · USA/Thailand
Directed by Spencer Thielmann, Emily Berge
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After missing her connecting flight in Chiang Mai, Lia forms an unexpected bond with her seatmate Ralph, and together they spend the remains of his prepaid honeymoon in Thailand confronting the big failings in their lives.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Lost in Translation but with Before Sunrise's marketing department, shot in a roadside Airbus fuselage which is the most interesting thing about it. The premise is a known quantity; my expectations are calibrated low.
Before Sunrise rerouted through Lost in Translation is a tested template, and the guerrilla-Thailand approach with the repurposed Airbus fuselage suggests resourcefulness over invention. Solid travel-and-strangers cinema, though not yet a formal departure.
Shooting plane interiors inside an actual Airbus fuselage repurposed as a roadside coffee shop is the kind of guerrilla location instinct that elevates a Before Sunrise riff — you can't art-direct that. Twenty minutes in Chiang Mai with a small crew is the right scale for this material.
Reviews
The film pulls its strength from a script filled with naturalistic dialogue and a pair of deeply real performances from actors Tal Chatterjee and W. Ian Ross.
A touching film that will resonate with anyone who's ever wandered the earth in search of something unfamiliar, depicting an experience not often seen in short films.