Thailand: Four years after the thrilling rescue of a group of 12 boys and their soccer coach from a cave in Thailand, their story has found its way to the silver screen with Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning film Thirteen Lives.
The boys, aged between 11 and 16, and their 25-year-old coach at the time were exploring a cave in northern Thailand’s Chiang Rai region in June 2018 when monsoon rains flooded the tunnels and trapped them underground.
The boys survived for nine days inside the cave, which was partially flooded before two British divers reached them, but it took another eight days to extract them from the cave.
The film re-imagines the 17-day ordeal, as volunteers, engineers and soldiers pulled millions of litres of water from the cave and dug into the rocks, looking for holes to reach the boys.
“What has happened is amazing,” Howard told the media at the film’s launch event on Monday. It’s not just about hero divers. It was really a system that included an entire society, a country and even a lot of countries that ultimately contributed to achieving something amazing.”
The film stars American Viggo Mortensen and Ireland’s Colin Farrell as British divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, as well as Australian actor Joel Edgerton as Harry Harris, who is brought in for help when options to save the boys run out.
Thai and non-professional actors were selected for supporting roles, in addition to many young boys who play the roles of members of the “Wild Boar” football team and who had no previous acting experience.
The film will start showing in select cinemas in the United States and Britain on July 29 and will be shown globally on Amazon Prime Video from August 5.
Stanton, Volanthen, and members of the International Diving Rescue Team attended the film’s launch and praised Howard’s presentation of events.
“I think it’s good that people know what happened,” Stanton said. It is not a documentary, but it is very realistic.”
