The title of this short suggests that it will focus as a documentary on the roots of the drug yaba but mostly this is not the case as instead we spend time with one group of men in a broken down shed to see the effects. The reference to Hitler is that this drug was developed by Nazi chemists in order to keep soldiers fighting around the clock and indeed we hear in this film that it will keep you away for days at a time, which is ironic because living in these conditions I personally would want to be awake as little as possible.
The film is mainly an interview with a man living on the border between Thailand and Cambodia who smokes yaba along with a group of "friends" who stay in his shack. When they have money they smoke yaba and when they don't then they go and get a job to get money to pay for the drug – but good money he stresses, not criminal because after all "we are not black people, we are not mafia" (a line that caught me off guard a little!). The guy in the interview is engaging and honest and speaks very good English while acknowledging his lowly existence. We see him try to squeeze a little drug from some yaba-infused water, talk about how he does it and also make arrangements to smuggle people across the border for money. He is engaging and personable and the film did very well to get such a good subject because he draws you in.
The downside of this tight focus is that while we see his conditions, we don't really understand the appeal of yaba, nor the real damage it does. The access to the shack and the men is really good but I was looking to understand more as well and here I'm not entirely sure the film did that as well as it could although what it does do works very well. There is a more detailed documentary on yaba in here that never gets out, but for the access to their subject, the filmmakers do give us an engaging short film that ends with a sobering thought.
