By the Time It Gets Dark (Dao khanong)

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong. With Arak Amornsupasiri, Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Achtara Suwan
Thailand 2016, DCP, color, 105 min. Thai with English subtitles. Free Admission.

Please join us for an evening with Film Study Center fellow and VES visiting faculty member Anocha Suwichakornpong. Anocha will be present for a post screening Q&A and reception following the film. Co-sponsored by The Film Study Center, The Visual and Environmental Studies Department, and the Thai Studies Program.

“Suwichakornpong’s new film bravely tackles a subject long taboo for Thai artists and writers: the Thammasat University Massacre of 1976, in which a still-unconfirmed number of protesting students were brutally murdered by the military. Rather than a head-on confrontation with the horrific incident, however, By the Time It Gets Dark takes a more nuanced and digressive path, interweaving the seemingly disconnected stories of a filmmaker researching the massacre together with those of a young pop star and a melancholy maid who drifts enigmatically throughout the film. What unites these different characters, Suwichakornpong seems to suggest, is the still-pulsing trauma of history that has been denied yet not forgotten. In its lyrical interweaving of character narrative and documentary interludes, and in its pixel-imploding ending, By the Time It Gets Dark goes further still by suggesting the limits of the dizzying image world that we increasingly inhabit and the ways in which cinema might give a safe place for local histories and personal memories to be kept alive.” – Haden Guest, Harvard Film Archive

“A head-spinning tour de force … elliptically political, frequently perplexing, yet fluid enough in its possibilities to allow each viewer to divine their own meanings from its quicksilver forms” – Mark Kermode, The Guardian