Pongsatorn Thongjaroen

Pongsatorn Thongjaroen (Thai: พงศธร ทองเจริญ), known as Not, is a Thai director. He directed all ten episodes of Petrichor (หยดฝนกลิ่นสนิม, 2024), the Girls’ Love crime series for iQIYI Pictures and TV Thunder, and all twelve of the Boys’ Love series Paint With Love (2021).

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Communication Technology from the Department of Photography and Film at Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi.

Seven years carrying other people’s sets first

Before he directed anything, he spent half a decade as an assistant director on Thai commercial cinema. He was second assistant director on Ong Bak 3 (2010) and on Shambhala (2012), and first assistant director on How They Save the World! (2012), Back to the 90s (2015) and Cat A Wabb (2015).

His first directing credit is Bangkok Love Stories: Charming Person (2017), thirteen episodes. Since then he has worked almost entirely in long-form Thai television: Paint With Love (2021, 12 episodes), Junk Mail (2022, 20 episodes), My Coach (2022, 16 episodes), Escape to Homestay (2023, 8 episodes), Intern in My Heart (2024, 10 episodes), Petrichor (2024, 10 episodes) and Unlimited Love (2025, 10 episodes).

BLGLFlix editorial view. There is a question about Thai Boys’ Love and Girls’ Love that gets asked constantly and answered badly: why does it look the way it does? Competent, fast, heavy on coverage, unfussy, occasionally beautiful and almost never experimental. The usual answers reach for budget or for audience taste.

Here is a better one. The people directing it trained on Thai action films.

This record runs from Ong Bak 3 to a Girls’ Love crime thriller, and it is not an isolated case. Elsewhere in this catalogue we hold another director whose early work includes the Ong-Bak production and who went on to make Thailand’s earliest Girls’ Love feature and, fourteen years later, a Girls’ Love series for national television. Two of the directors in our records came out of the same corner of Thai commercial cinema.

Our own read is that this is the single most useful thing to know about how these series are shot. An assistant director on an action film learns one skill above all others: how to get the day’s work in the can on schedule with a crew that is tired. That is exactly the skill a twenty episode Thai television series demands, and it is why Thai queer drama is so reliably watchable and so rarely strange. The training that makes a director dependable is not the training that makes one unpredictable.

The other detail worth noticing is that Paint With Love in 2021 and Petrichor in 2024 sit inside a filmography that is otherwise general drama. Between them are a twenty episode series, a sixteen episode series and two more besides. He is not a genre director who occasionally works outside it. He is a working television director who has made one Boys’ Love series and one Girls’ Love series among many other things, which in Thailand is now an entirely ordinary shape for a career.