By the Time It Gets Dark
Pacific Arts Movement
•
1h 46m
Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong • Drama • With Visra Vichit-Vadakan, Arak Amornsupasiri, Achtara Suwan • 2017 • 105 minutes
A shape-shifting narrative around memory, politics and cinema, the film weaves together the stories of several characters. We meet a young waitress serving breakfast at an idyllic country cafe, only to later find her employed in the busy dining room of a river cruise ship. And we meet a filmmaker interviewing an older woman whose life was transformed by the political activism of her student years and the Thammasat University massacre of 1976. With her tender, unobtrusive filmmaking style, Suwichakornpong allows us to get to know these characters slowly and deeply. At the same time, we see how their beautiful country and its troubled history inform their actions and identities in ways both overt and subtle.
"A swirl of startling, sensuously rendered transitions, identities sliding among characters, fictions [within] fictions... A heady iconoclast snooping out profound points of exchange between the possibilities of narration."—Film Comment
"Remarkable… Suwichakornpong abdicate[s] logic and directorial control in favor of a strangely intuitive, even random, rethinking of narrative and historiography."—Artforum
Up Next in Pacific Arts Movement
-
Creepy
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa • Drama • With Hidetoshi Nishijima, Yûko Takeuchi, Toru Baba • 2017 • 130 minutes
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who made his name with classics CURE and BRIGHT FUTURE, gets back to his roots by putting the thumbscrews to the audience with his latest, CREEPY. A year after a botch...
-
Demons
Directed by Daniel Hui • Drama • With Vicki Yang, Glen Goei, Vikneshwaran Kobinathan • 2018 • 84 minutes
Aspiring actress Vicki thinks she has gotten the role of her life in Daniel’s new play. But her debut lead role only casts her into endless torture at the esteemed director’s hands. When she ...
-
Girls Always Happy
Directed by Yang Mingming • Drama • With Yang Mingming, Nai An • 2018 • 116 minutes
Rising Chinese director Yang Mingming both directs and stars in GIRLS ALWAYS HAPPY – a mother-daughter story that goes for the jugular.
Wu (Yang Mingming) and her mother (Nai An) live in a Beijing hutong – an ol...
