Bringing this post back about Claire Jirassaya's filmography because I've been thinking about her work recently.
She is My Best Friend still isn't available online, but it has a lot of similarities to Flat Girls. Each are films about two teenaged girls playing badminton together. Through their interactions on the court, Claire begins to hint at the girls' intensely complicated relationship. Both works also have very similar settings- a run down badminton court surrounded by an apartment building.
I'm not the first person to have noticed this/pointed this out (I think even GDH mentioned this connection in one of their promotional posts), but it's so cool to see that one of her early films was potentially built off of/extended in her most recent work.
In a 2026 interview, Claire talked about how several of her films have been inspired by different life experiences. For instance, Welcome Home combines the memories that she had of her father with the real-life experience of living with a family member after a flood. Her upbringing in the police flats became the basis for Flat Girls.
In terms of badminton and its significance across two different films, Claire notes that:
“[It] was something I did every day while living at the flats. I saw friendships form because of it, and I had fights with friends because of it. I saw differences in social status through the gear people used.* I saw ‘life’ through badminton all the time, so it was impossible not to include it in my work.”
*editor's note: from the trailer, it seems like differences in gear is a theme that's also potentially explored in She is My Best Friend
Something else that I wanted to bring up was that for a themed film screening, Momentum grouped She is My Best Friend together with a few other queer films in a collection called "We Won't Grow Old Together."
This is interesting because in Flat Girls, the main characters face so many challenges that even though they're close to each other, it almost feel inevitable that in the end they'll have to go their separate ways. They're both dealing with financial and familial issues, the weight of which at times can feel very overwhelming.
I think throughout Claire's work there's a lot of common threads- teenaged characters/plotlines about growing up, ambiguous or confusing relationships where things often go unspoken/unsaid- but it's really interesting to think about the commonality between both films of not letting their characters "grow old together" (a bit doomed yuri core if you will).
Another thing I wanted to mention is that, at times, She is My Best Friend, That Day of the Month, and Flat Girls feel a bit reminiscent of a few other Thai sapphic films from the mid 2010s, such as I Want To... (2016), The Birds from the Sun (2018), and Reverse (2019).
In I Want To..., the film's main characters, Pin and Pie, have gradually stopped being friends. Their relationship has deteriorated due to a combination of jealousy and unsaid feelings. Like Jane and Ann (the protagonists of Flat Girls), it feels like there's so much ambiguity between them, and sometimes even confusion about the meaning of different feelings.
In The Birds from the Sun, the main characters have briefly reunited after a long period of separation. It could be interpreted that they still have feelings for each other, but there's almost a sense throughout the film that they can't go back to what they used to be.
In Reverse, Aim's similar reunification with her ex causes the film's sense of temporality to become warped- constantly switching between the present and the past. The opening and closing lines of the film ("I wanted to forget you but you are always there in my dream. For you, who will always be a part of me") carries with it the same bittersweet feeling as Flat Girls.
I think in all of these films there's a throughline of the intensity of female intimacy as well as adolescent/queer uncertainty- not knowing what to say, or how to understand what's going on, or maybe even being too scared to say it.
There's not a definitive link between IWT, TBFTS, Reverse, and the rest of Claire's work, but if you liked Flat Girls, you might be interested in some other Thai films that have a similar vibe/atmosphere.
Ultimately, I think all of these films are interesting in terms of the way that they tackle themes related to sexuality and adolescence- they manage to feel realistic yet deeply personal.
