By the Time It Gets Dark

Seeded by a historical event—the Thammasat University massacre of 1976, in which a student protest was brutally quashed by Thai government forces—this elliptical, bewitching film unfurls like a mutant growth from the compost of the past. At a tranquil country house, a film director interviews a former student activist in preparation for a movie based on her memories. This self-reflexive premise refracts into multiple films within films, a group of stories and fragments, tenuously linked by the recurring figure of a woman who appears in various menial jobs on the periphery of other characters’ lives. Digressions spiral out and back, looping in everything from the early cinema magic of Georges Méliès and time-lapse images of fungal growth to pop music videos and supernatural powers, until not only the predictable narrative structure but the structure of the image itself breaks down. Director Anocha Suwichakornpong was born in the year of the Thammasat massacre, and she has spoken of the echoes between the events of the 1970s and the climate of suppression in Thailand today. In her vision of both history and cinema, time is less a forward-flowing stream than an eddying pool where deep currents cross, circle, and change direction. –Juliet Clark