Monrak Transistor

Phaen is a country boy in rural Thailand who loves singing luk thung music. After marrying his sweetheart Sadao and giving her a small transistor radio as a wedding gift, he is conscripted into the army. Eager to perform, he sneaks away from his military post to enter a singing contest in Bangkok, leaving Sadao behind pregnant and waiting for his letters. His decision pulls him away from the stage and into a sequence of bad luck, from menial labor and an accidental killing to forced work on a sugarcane farm and prison.