Gohan, a Thai dog drama, takes the first audience vote at Sharjah's youth film festival

Gohan, a Thai drama about a stray white dog passed between three owners, won the first Audience Award in the history of the Sharjah International Film Festival for Children and Youth, which closed on November 1, 2026. Festivalgoers voted by scanning a QR code after each screening. The film, made by the Bangkok studio GDH 559, had its Middle East premiere there, and Sharjah24 reported that all tickets for it had sold out.

A vote cast on a phone

The 13th edition of the festival, organised by FANN – Media Discovery Platform in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, screened 71 films from 38 countries. They were picked from 1,802 submissions sent from 72 countries, according to the festival's closing announcement of November 2, 2026. The same announcement counts more than 50,000 visitors, participants and students over the festival's run. Brunei, Burkina Faso and Mauritania took part for the first time, and Egypt, France, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and India had the most selected films.

The juries gave the main prizes to other films. Atlas of the Universe, directed by Paul Negoescu, took Best Feature Film, and the Brazilian animation My Grandfather Is a Nihonjin won Best Animated Feature Film. Gohan's three directors received a Special Mention for their work on the film.

The Audience Award is new. Variety reported on the closing weekend that festivalgoers could scan a QR code after each screening to rate the film, and that Gohan won the inaugural award. Huda Al Harmoudi, deputy director of FANN, told Variety: “We wanted to give them a greater role in the festival and make their opinions count.”

Gohan came in through the Green Carpet programme, a lineup of three films. The other two were the Italian film Forever With You and the Austrian-German animated film Monster Mia. Italy was the festival's Guest of Honour this year.

The festival is built around young people, and its structure shows it. A Junior Jurors programme lets children and young people aged 12 to 20 learn film criticism and help judge the entries in the Child and Youth-Made Films competition. Workshops ran alongside the screenings, among them one on script breakdown and shooting plans and another on creating content with artificial intelligence, organised by the Rubu' Qarn Foundation and described by Sharjah24 on October 30.

Variety adds that the festival doubled its pitching platform in its second year, from three projects in 2025 to six. The platform gives no cash prize and instead puts filmmakers in front of people who could provide financing or production support.

A QR code rewards the film people were still thinking about in the foyer.

Three directors, three dogs

The film follows one dog across more than a decade. Thairath, the Thai daily, describes a white puppy with a pink nose who waits outside a 7-Eleven, then meets Hiro, a Japanese car engineer close to retirement, who names him Gohan. The word is Japanese for rice.

He later passes to Namcha, a Burmese housekeeper, and in his last years to Pelé and Jaidee, two university students. The film is spoken in Thai, Japanese and Burmese.

The plot summary on Wikipedia, which carries a banner saying it needs improving, gives the middle chapter an edge that the festival's description leaves out. A shelter owner sedates stray dogs so that they look sick on livestreams, where viewers send donations for their treatment. Namcha, an undocumented migrant worker from Myanmar, frees them, and a recorded confrontation at a station is suggested to harm the owner's business for good. In a film that won an audience vote, the villain is a man who sells attention for a dog's suffering.

The structure is also a division of labour. According to Wikipedia's account of the production, which cites Thai press interviews, Chayanop Boonprakob directed the puppy chapter, Nattawut “Baz” Poonpiriya the adult years and Atta Hemwadee the old age. Nattawut also directed Bad Genius (2017).

The same account says three real dogs play Gohan, one for each stage, and that all of them have a stray past. Hima, who plays the old dog, was found abandoned at a market in Chiang Mai, and Nattawut happened to come across him and brought him to Bangkok for treatment. Meechok, who plays the adult, is the only one with an owner and was already a social media star, so Nattawut had to persuade the owner that the film was real and that he was not a scammer. Kori, the puppy, had not been born when casting began. Producer Vanridee Pongsittisak says the project began with her and Nattawut's love of dogs, and a team of veterinarians and animal specialists was on set throughout.

A hit that travelled before it reached Sharjah

GDH did not wait for the box office to build an audience. The film was pre-sold in Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia before its trailer was shown at the European Film Market in Berlin in early 2026, according to Wikipedia. A press conference on March 4 and a gala premiere on April 1 at a Bangkok cinema, where a large Gohan mascot made its debut, came before the release on April 2.

Sharjah was not the film's first audience. Gohan opened in Thailand on April 2, 2026, over the Songkran holiday, the Thai New Year. Thairath reported 30 million baht for the opening weekend, from April 2 to 6, a figure it attributes to a Facebook page that tracks Thai box office and describes as the nationwide gross reported by GDH.

By June 11, 2026, Deadline reported, the film had crossed 100 million baht, about $3 million, in Thailand and had topped the Vietnamese box office when it opened there in May. GDH had announced ahead of the Cannes festival that it had sold the film to more than 40 territories.

The studio has done this before. Deadline notes that GDH also produced How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies and Bad Genius, both box office hits in mainland China.

China was next. Deadline reported that Road Pictures would release Gohan there on June 26, and that Nattawut and two cast members, Jinjett Wattanasin and Tontawan Tantivejakul, would attend a Beijing premiere on June 18 and a special screening at the Shanghai International Film Festival on June 19.

Scale matters here. In the same article Deadline notes that the Chinese romance Dear You had grossed $247 million in China by June 11, which puts the $3 million Gohan made at home in perspective.

The film reached North America on July 21, 2026, when the 25th New York Asian Film Festival screened it in its Thai Visions section, according to Wikipedia.

Warm reviews, and one that disagreed

Thai viewers did not agree on the film. Wikipedia's summary of the Thai reaction cites Kanin The Movie, a Facebook review page, which finds the premise familiar but the telling intimate. It also cites a YouTube review channel, Filmment, which praised the scenes with the three dogs and flagged a lack of emotional continuity, since each chapter has its own style. The channel's owner added that he might be among the minority who did not enjoy the film.

That is a small sample of two online voices, and neither is a professional critic. It does show where the film divides: the three-part structure that gave it three directors is also what some viewers found hard to follow as a single story.

A festival audience in Sharjah met the film months after that debate began, in a cinema, as one title among many on the programme. Its jury did not rank it first, but it gave the three directors a Special Mention, and the people who scanned a code did rank it first.

A prize with no published tally

Neither the Sharjah24 closing report nor the Variety report gives the number of votes cast, the rating Gohan received or the margin over other films. The vote counts the people who scanned the code, which is not the same group as everyone who watched. Sharjah24 says the Gohan screening was sold out, so at least some voters were people who had booked a seat for a Thai film in Sharjah.

Al Harmoudi told Variety that the response to the audience vote had been very positive. Al Harmoudi also said in the closing announcement: “We wanted the festival to be more than a place to watch films.”

The audience prize is also not the festival's judgment of quality. The jury prizes went to other films, and the feature film jury gave Gohan a Special Mention beside the public's vote.

For readers in the United States and Britain, none of the coverage cited here gives a theatrical or streaming release date for Gohan in either country. What they do date is its North American premiere in New York on July 21, 2026, and a festival audience in the Gulf that placed it first more than three months later.

Sources

• SIFF13 concludes, announces award winners, Sharjah24, November 2, 2026