Anocha Suwichakornpong: A Retrospective
Since her Columbia thesis film "Graceland" premiered at Cannes in 2006, Anocha Suwichakornpong has established herself among the most unpredictable of contemporary filmmakers. While consistent in her preoccupations, chief among these the social and political history of her native Thailand, she employs an eclectic array of formal and narrative devices that frustrate any attempt at passive viewing—see, for instance, "By the Time it Gets Dark", with its shapeshifting, multipronged approach to making a “historical film,” this one specifically concerned with the 1976 Thammasat University massacre, or "The Ambassadors", her first collaboration with Ben Rivers, in which an episode from the history of Thai-British relations intermingles with imagery of prehistoric creatures and animated vignettes. Metrograph At Home presents a survey of an artist who relentlessly interrogates and subverts established forms, suggesting fresh relations between lived experience and its cinematic representation.
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At Home with Anocha Suwichakornpong
Directed by Metrograph | 8 mins | 2026
Filmmaker Anocha Suwichakornpong discusses her artistic practice and influences. -
Jai
Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 14 mins | 2007
Anticipating the questions around the limits of representation posed in "By the Time It Gets Dark" (2016), in "Jai", documentary elements bleed into the making of a fiction film about the landmark 1975 seizure and occupation of the Hara Factory ... -
Black Mirror
Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 3 mins | 2008
A haunting guitar track by Koichi Shimizu and Zai Kuning underscores this multi-textured, kaleidoscopic series of glimpses of modern-day Thailand, which was produced under the auspices of Electric Eel Films, the production house co-founded by Suw... -
Mundane History
Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 82 mins | 2009
Suwichakornpong’s transfixing, Rotterdam-awarded feature debut begins as a chamber drama, with Pun (Arkaney Cherkam), a male nurse from Thailand’s rural northeast, starting a new job as the caretaker of the paraplegic son of a well-off Bangkok f... -
Overseas
Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong and Wichanon Somunjarn | 16 mins | 2012
A little west of Bangkok lies Mahachai, home to a dense population of workers from Myanmar who eke out a meager living in the port town’s seafood processing factories. In unadorned fashion, "Overseas" presents a troubled d... -
By the Time It Gets Dark
Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 106 mins | 2016
Suwichakornpong’s second feature presents itself as a straightforward arthouse film about a young director, Ann (Visra Vichit-Vadakan), preparing a project about the 1976 massacre of student activists at Thammasat University. As its protagonist... -
Nightfall
Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 15 mins | 2016
An unnamed Thai woman, both flâneur and researcher, discovers traces of her native country inscribed on Singapore’s urban landscape in this mellow essay film, conceived as a light-touch fictionalization of Suwichakornpong’s experiences during an... -
The Ambassadors
Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 9 mins | 2018
Dotted with striking statues of prehistoric creatures, a popular tourist destination in Thailand provides the setting for a gently surreal meeting of Thai and British history, and of two of contemporary experimental cinema’s key figures: Suwichak... -
The Line
Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong | 17 mins | 2020
An artist and gallery staff prepare for the launch of a show that uses the winding vessel of the Mekong to play with concepts of spacetime and animism—much as this short does itself. It’s one of five shorts featured in the anthology film "Mekong...
