Recently I traveled up to Chiang Rai in Northern Thailand with journalists Richard C. Paddock and Muktita Suhartono of The New York Times to work on a story about the Thai boys football team who were trapped in a remote flooded cave in 2018. The rescue went global and since then several big budget movies/series, including Netflix, have come out this year telling their remarkable story. We wanted to see what had happened to the boys and the area over the last 4 years.

Turns out that we were unable to meet them, their families and even the coach. Having sold the rights of their stories to a Thai company, who in-turn sold them to Netflix, it meant that they are not allowed to be interviewed or photographed by any media for years. As a result we had to meet people able to talk and looked at how this remote corner of Northern Thailand had changed since the rescue.